Tea at Trianon: King and Conqueror, History and Fiction

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 8, 2025

King and Conqueror, History and Fiction

I want to know why, in recent films and series, those of Celtic descent and even British aristocrats are depicted as coming from sub-Saharan Africa. And now in King and Conqueror, we have black Anglo-Saxons. The Angles and Saxons were Germanic tribes and tended to be light-skinned. They had little or no interaction with Africa and Africans. From Eleanor Parker:

The problem of backstory
What they've chosen to do in this series is ambitious (possibly over-ambitious). They aim to tell the story of the years leading up to the Norman Conquest, and not only to depict the - already very crowded - events of 1066 itself. They've also decided to tell it on both sides of the Channel, splitting narrative time and sympathy between Harold Godwineson and William of Normandy. This is a lot of material. It involves a huge number of characters and events; the problem is not too few historical sources to reckon with in constructing a narrative, but far too many. It means trying to dramatise not only events in Anglo-Saxon England over the span of two decades (in a period of history about which most people have only the vaguest ideas), but also to introduce the audience to a host of characters and political relationships in Normandy, France, Brittany and Flanders, which will all be very unfamiliar at least to British viewers. These goals - wanting to provide balance between Harold and William, a wider European context, and a long run-up to the Battle of Hastings - are in essence worthwhile, I think, and fresh and interesting. But they raise very big challenges.
Many of the changes to the historical narrative which people have complained about make most sense if you see them not as careless blunders, or silly gambits to make the story more exciting, but as attempts to deal with these challenges. (Not to say there aren't some silly and careless bits too.) The series is in dialogue with the medieval sources in some more subtle ways than might at first appear, and in my view it often, though certainly not always, manages to feel essentially true to the dynamics of the story - its characters, relationships, and emotional beats - even where it's taking great liberties with the facts.
The timeline is a good example. They’ve chosen to take the period of 20+ years prior to the Conquest and compress it into just a year or two of time passing on-screen. This will immediately be off-putting for some people who know the history (it was for me at first), but it's not a stupid thing to do. They wanted to include the emotional and political build-up to 1066, to create a context for the characters’ relationships and the succession crisis in England - for instance, to show how Harold’s position was influenced by his father Godwine’s long, tense history with Edward the Confessor and Queen Emma. That’s a good choice, very true to the spirit of the medieval sources. But, considering Godwine and Emma died years before the Conquest, how do you do that practically? It would be easy in a novel, but drama presents different challenges. Do you set it all in 1066 and do flashbacks? Or do you try to cover 20+ years with constant jumps forward, ‘three months later’, ‘four years later’, all while your cast don’t age a day? Surely that wouldn't work. Instead, they change the timeline and have a lot happen very fast in the first few episodes.
Sometimes this also means using invented scenes to get across points which are important to the story, but simply can't be represented as they happened in real life. Most of the key incidents in the conflict between Edward and Godwine's family were played out through struggles which even a medieval historian has to admit wouldn’t be TV-friendly, such as a tussle over whom Edward would appoint as archbishop of Canterbury. So, to use an example from the first episode, it seems obviously efficient from a storytelling point of view to take a number of events which did actually happen, over the space of a few years - Edward is crowned king after a period of conflict in England (1043), Edward marries Godwine’s daughter (1045) but later distances himself from her (1051), Swein Godwineson disgraces his family by his violent behaviour (1047-1049), Edward favours his Norman allies and publicly moves against the Godwinesons (1051), and William of Normandy perhaps visits Edward’s court (1051) - and illustrate them all in one scene at Edward's coronation. In real life this took nearly ten years, but on screen it takes about three minutes. Now, whether all those dynamics are communicated on screen in a way that helps the audience understand what they’re going for story-wise is a different question, but there is a logic to this as a fictionalised representation of the historical events. (Read more.)

From Tales of the Middle Ages:

The indoor scenes are murky, which may be a deliberate stylistic choice, but it ultimately makes everything look drab. The sets were completely unrealistic and bore no resemblance to the homes of powerful nobles. Grand halls should have been filled with tapestries, carved furniture, and the wealth of the age, but what we saw looked more like a modern farmhouse than a medieval stronghold. There’s not a wall hanging in sight, and even the drinking cups are wrong.

The costumes were no better. Why didn’t the women have wimples on? They’d never have walked around bareheaded in that way. The nobles looked scruffy with no finery, and the leather looked modern....
And don’t even get me started on William. The show opens with him on foot during the Battle of Hastings, screaming for Harold to come fight him one-on-one. In the wrong costume. It was baffling. Then Harold sheathes his sword with blood still dripping from the hilt to the tip. Anyone who’s ever handled a weapon knows you’d never do that.

Then there’s Edward the Confessor. I’m a fan of Eddie Marsan, but he was the completely wrong actor for the part, and the way they’ve written him is just bizarre, with no resemblance to the man I read about in my history A Level.

The bit that really got me was when Harold rode into London. Or should I say a few huts in a muddy enclosure that we were told was London. Honestly, it looked like something out of a low-budget student film.

All in all, I struggled to get through the first episode and forced myself to sit through the second. None of it flowed, and it was so confusing I struggled to understand what was going on. Knowing the history of this period didn’t help either, as it was so far away from what actually happened. (Read more.)