Ricardian Fiction

On Reshaping History

Sharon Kay Penman

What did Mark Twain think about England’s most controversial king? I confess I do not know. But since Twain once wrote that "the very ink of history is written with fluid prejudice," it is certainly possible that he’d have been somewhat skeptical of the traditional view of Richard III as Evil Incarnate. At least I’d like to think so. Twain understood that history does not come down to us from the heights of Mount Sinai. It is open to question, subject to distortion, filtered through our own biases and expectations--and in Richard’s case, skewed for all eternity, courtesy of a certain playwright from Stratford upon Avon.

Because Richard’s story is so disputed and so dramatic and so tragic, his life has been a rich source for writers down through the centuries. When I stumbled onto his history, I had no idea that it would lead me to a career as a novelist. My first reaction was a sense of indignation, anger at the injustice done this long-dead medieval king. Since my initial attempts to share my indignation with my friends invariably resulted in a blank stare or a "Richard who?", I decided to channel my outrage onto the printed page, and the eventual result was The Sunne in Splendour. Because I had the bad luck to have the only copy of the manuscript stolen, it would take me more than twelve years to complete the book, and by that time, I was hopelessly hooked upon writing about the Middle Ages. Fortunately for me, the Plantagenets produced enough rebellious sons and disgruntled brothers and conniving kings and willful queens to provide me with material for a dozen books, at the very least.

I recently had a letter from a woman who wrote to tell me that she’d enjoyed my books. In the course of the letter, she posed an interesting question. Princess Diana had just died and in the wake of the maelstrom of criticism directed at the tabloids, she found herself wondering if historical novelists might be guilty of exploiting the lives of the people they write about.

Few of us would equate writing a novel about Mary, Queen of Scots or William Wallace with the stalking and ambushes and high-speed chases of the paparazzi in search of their celebrity prey, and, I hasten to add, neither did my correspondent. But her query raised some very intriguing issues. What is the responsibility of the historical novelist? How much license can we take in our depiction of people who actually lived and events that truly happened? What do we owe our readers--and the long-dead men and women we write about?

I remember reading an article by William Styron some years ago in which he dealt with some of these very issues. His feeling was that novelists ought not to tamper with the memories of their readers, and I believe he suggested a cut-off period of fifty years. In other words, we can in good conscience write about Abraham Lincoln or Florence Nightingale--provided we do our research, of course! But we ought to think twice before casting John F. Kennedy as our major protagonist--or villain. I seem to remember that he even coined a term for this uneasy blend of history and fiction--faction.

I realize that not every one will agree with Mr. Styron on this issue. But even those novelists who see no harm in writing of recent or current events will surely agree that there are limits to be set, lines to be drawn. Since I cannot answer for other writers, I can only offer my own guidelines. In writing my historical novels, clearly I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as "filling in the blanks." As I mentioned in one of my Author’s Notes, medieval chroniclers could be utterly indifferent to the needs of future novelists. Sometimes it is necessary to "invent" essential details; for example, I had to pick my own date for Richard and Anne Neville’s wedding, and again for the birth of their son.

But there is a great difference between "filling in the blanks" and distorting known facts. On those few occasions when I’ve had to tamper with history--as when I set Edward’s 1469 confrontation with the Earl of Warwick at Middleham instead of Pontefract--I make sure to mention my tampering in an Author’s Note. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. Obviously, this is not always possible. Sometimes all we know of a medieval man or woman are the stark outlines of their lives; women in particular too often slipped through the cracks.

And sometimes there is a need to reconcile conflicting images. Simon de Montfort’s second son and namesake (called Bran in my novels to save my sanity) came to his uncle’s defense within hours of arriving at the Evesham battlefield just in time to see his father’s head on a pike. As devastated as he must have been, he still stopped the Kenilworth garrison from taking revenge upon Henry III’s captive brother, the Earl of Cornwall. Yet within five years, this same man took part in one of the thirteenth century’s most notorious crimes. He and his brother Guy murdered their cousin during High Mass, in an act of vengeance that was as foolhardy as it was futile. Even after taking into account that Guy was the ringleader in this brutal killing, I still had to explain how Bran’s sense of mercy and fair play could have eroded enough to bring him to that blood-stained Italian church. "My" Bran was a man tormented by guilt, a man who blamed himself--with some justification--for the battlefield deaths of his father and elder brother, a despairing, lost soul who sought to drown his pain in wine flagons and ale kegs. The five years after Evesham were a slow spiral down into the dark for Bran, making the killing at Viterbo not only understandable but almost inevitable.

Now--how true to history was I? True enough so that I could still sleep at night! We know that the real Bran was shattered by his father’s death and the part he played in that tragedy. While no chronicler mentions him turning to wine for solace, it makes sense to me that he might well have done so. And so I feel that in creating the character of Bran, I kept faith both with the historical evidence and my readers.

It is very important to me not to mislead my readers. I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels, and rely upon my Author’s Notes to keep my conscience clear. Because the Plantagenets led such wildly improbable lives, I often find myself reassuring my readers after one of my novels that Yes, this really did happen. Just the opposite will be true in my medieval mysteries, where I’ll be warning readers that the plots come from my imagination, not from history. Whether I am writing about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Justin de Quincy and his duplicitous lady-love, Claudine de Loudun, it matters greatly to me that my readers can trust what I write, that they know there may be mistakes in my books but never deliberate distortions. I try to bear in mind the words of Samuel Butler: "Though God cannot alter the past, historians can." Historical novelists can do even more damage, almost as much as Hollywood screenwriters--or sixteenth century English playwrights.

About the Author: Sharon Kay Penman needs no introduction to most Ricardians. Her first novel, The Sunne in Splendour (Holt, 1982), won Richard III many new friends with its sympathetic portrayal and is held up, along with her other novels, as models of accuracy in historical fiction. Her subsequent novels include Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, The Reckoning, and When Christ and His Saints Slept. In 1996, Penman entered the realm of medieval mysteries with her first mystery novel, The Queen's Man, which was nominated for an Edgar award. Penman is currently working on another mystery, to be released in fall 1998, and novel about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, to be released in fall 1999. For more information on Penman's novels, see the Richard III Society web site (http://www.r3.org/penman/). Panman lives in Mays Landing, New Jersey with her three dogs.

[Fiction Section]