Catherine the Great used to read history to calm her spirit. If it was good enough for Kate the Great, it’s good enough for me.
So I’ve been revisiting the case of Richard III, the king whom Shakespeare crafted into a bloodthirsty monster. Leaving the Bard out in the cold, I’ve just finished reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. “One of best mystery novels ever written,” seems to be the critical consensus.
To me the most intriguing and instructive aspect of the book is its examination of how fake history, falsehood, folklore, propaganda, etc. get transmuted into “real history” and published widely, taught universally, and blinds posterity to the truth.
Other than that it’s pretty cool.
So who knew that that whole business of Richard murdering the little princes in the tower… was a lot of hooey?
Well, according to Josephine Tey, serious, fair-minded students of history have always known that Richard was innocent of that crime–innocent, in fact, of just about everything they ever charged him with. Establishment history was built on lies, sensationalism, Shakespeare’s play, Tudor truth-bending, and our attraction to a lurid story: some inner perversity makes some of us want evil stories to be true.
I think we are dangerously close to living in a time like Richard’s, and not far at all from inheriting bulging sacks full of lies and calling it “history.” Oh, we are so close to that!
And as we also know from history… sometimes the Bad Guys win.
Well, Josephine Tey kind of stacks the deck a bit in her novel, but I’ve agreed with most of her conclusions for a long time – ever since college, in fact, and that was a looooong time ago — including her contention that Henry VII had the two princes killed. I even belonged to the Richard III Society for a number of years, and I still have my White Boar badge. (Richard’s standard was the white boar, with the motto “Loialte me lie,” or “Loyalty binds me.”) Come to think of it, I might rejoin the Society — they have a website at richardiii.net .
Have you ever played “Kingmaker”?
I just now had to look up the game to see what it was about. To tell the truth, I prefer not to play pretend about history. What happened happened, and I want to find out the facts, not try to make up my own. (I know some people like to play these games in order to feel like “part of history.” It’s not my thing, though. Chacun à son goût.)
Well, it was the only way to make Clarence king of England.
I used to love reading “ancient” history, and in some of my classes, we even did some studies on that. Some of the kids didn’t like it but I did. I haven’t read much of it recently, but once upon a time, I found it quite fascinating.
Shakespeare lost his shine for me when I found out so much of his version of history was bunk, but he did have a great gift for inventing new words which I do love about him. It is said, to the victors goes the spoils, and it can also be said to the victors goes the account of history. The most accurate history book I know of is The Holy Bible.
You got that right. The Scriptures are really the only accounts we can trust.
There have always been historians who did their level best to get at the truth–and I think I owe them a lot.