Edits, writing, research and trips

Beautiful Portballintrae on the Northern Irish coast, where I've been doing a lot of my writing

I have just returned from a flying three-day visit to London to carry out research for my next book, Young and Damned and Fair, a biography of Queen Catherine Howard. It was a macabre but fascinating trip, which gave me the opportunity to look at some of the original documents concerning Catherine and her tragic fate. 

I wanted to apologise for posting so infrequently over the last few months; they have been manic. My play, The Gate of the Year, a modernised imagining of the French Revolution, was revived in Belfast in December, and since then, my schedule has been consumed. I adore being busy, so I'm enjoying myself. I've also released my book with Made Global, A History of the English Monarchy from Boadicea to Elizabeth I, which is available now, and we're currently organising a blog tour for it. I've been giving talks in London and Belfast - one about The Gate of the Year and the interactions between history and fiction, and another about the Harden-Eulenburg Affair and the crisis of personal monarchy in Wilhelm II's Germany. I'm also thrilled and delighted to say that my first novel Popular is being adapted for a 10-part radio series in Northern Ireland, and there is some very, very exciting further news in the pipeline about another potential theatre tour - and a documentary about the novels! Which I'll be able to give more details about, very soon.

From this summer, I've also taken over as editor of the e-magazine Tudor Life, which is a subscription magazine featuring articles from experts, enthusiasts, art critics and reviewers, all of whom are writing about the Tudor, early modern and medieval world. I've been writing a column for the magazine since its first edition and it is so exciting to be involved in this next stage!

Over the next few months, our issues' themes will include vulnerability in Tudor Britain - for which I've contributed an article entitled "The Love That Dare not speak its name?: Homosexuality and moral complexity in Tudor England". (There's a short extract at the end of this post!) As well as issues on coronations, the Tudors in movies and fiction, attitudes to death and the afterlife, and the impact of the Protestant Reformation. Along with the magazine's wonderful regular contributors, we'll be hosting articles from people like Leanda de Lisle, Amy Licence, Toni Mount, Dominic Pearce, Conor Byrne, and Kathryn Warner.

At the end of the month, I'll be undertaking another research trip in England, so I've decided that I'll post a few videos and short articles to this blog while I'm there. My next few proper-length articles for this blog will be a few pieces I have musing on the nature of being British in the 21st century and answering the questions of if the national identity is in crisis and, if so, why.

I also have an Instagram and Facebook page, which I post on regularly. It has been such a pain not being able to post as often as I used to on this blog, although it's certainly for the best reasons. I don't want to post anything too distracting or half-hearted, so thank you for bearing with me and for all your encouragement with pursuing this biography. I hope it lives up to your faith in it, and your wonderful wishes!

Gareth 

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An excerpt from The Love that Dare not speak its name?: Homosexuality and moral complexity in Tudor England by Gareth Russell - published in the July 2015 edition of Tudor Life magazine

Within the aristocracy, attitudes were also much more heterogeneous than we might suppose. In the early 1600s, the Countess of Suffolk could discuss the King’s affair with the Duke of Buckingham with discretion and minimal embarrassment. A typical Renaissance education was heavy on the study of the Classics. This meant that young royals and nobles grew up being familiar with a few Classical myths that dealt with same-sex relationships, like the story of Jupiter and Ganymede, or Achilles and Patroclus in the Trojan saga – or even unambiguously homosexual historical figures, like the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Traditional moralists in Italy and France certainly blamed over-exposure to pagan histories in the classroom and universities for the alleged rise in ‘sodomy’ among young upper-class men in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

The death of George Boleyn: A guest post and blog tour

It's been quite the start to summer for fans of Tudor biographies, with studies on the lives of those usually defined by their relationship to the royal family's star players appearing to flesh out our knowledge of Henry VIII's dazzling but terrifying court. First, Lauren Mackey's biography of Eustace Chapuys, the prolific diplomat whose correspondence all historians owe a debt to, and secondly Clare Cherry and Claire Ridgway's biography George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier and Diplomat, which seeks to give a fairer understanding of Anne Boleyn's notorious brother, who perished in May 1536 on a fabricated charge of commiting incest with his sister the queen. Described by David Starkey as having all of Anne's confidence but only half her talents, George has recently been resurrected in popular culture in many different guises, featuring the novels, plays, television dramas and movies about the Henrician court.

With so much fascination and even more speculation about George Boleyn, Clare Cherry and Claire Ridgway (above) have teamed up to produce a biography of him, which I'm reading at the moment and which I can certainly recommend. To win your own signed copy of the book, read on to the end of this extract from George Boleyn, an account of his execution and interest in the Reformation. Thank you to the two Cla(i)res for this excerpt; it's a pleasure to host them as part of their blog tour to promote their new book.

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George Boleyn was executed on Tower Hill on 17^th May 1536. He had gone from palace to prison to execution within 15 days, and it is a testament to his courage and strength of character that he was able to defend himself so well at his trial and give such an impassioned speech on the scaffold, when lesser men would still have been in shock. He made a long penitent speech, which found admiration with the vast crowd gathered to witness the executions. There are a number of different versions of George’s speech, but they all agree on the basic content. Only Chapuys has George confessing that he deserved death for “having so contaminated and so contaminating others with the new sects”, and praying everyone to abandon such heresies. That is clearly not what he said, and is more a matter of wishful thinking by Chapuys.

The site of George Boleyn's execution

 After stepping on to the scaffold, George addressed the crowd:

“I was born under the law, and I die under the law, for as much as it is the law which has condemned me.”

According to two eyewitnesses, he said this three times, almost as if he were collecting his thoughts before continuing. But there was another reason. To say he died “under the law”, rather than admitting his guilt, was the closest he dared go to declaring his innocence. Therefore, he ensured the point was reiterated to the vast crowd of spectators, many of whom knew him personally. He went on to say that he was not there to preach a sermon but to die. He told the vast crowd that he deserved death because he was a wretched sinner who had grievously and often offended. He did not relate his sins, telling the crowd that they would derive no pleasure from hearing them, and that he would derive no pleasure from stating them. He merely said that God knew them all. He warned everyone present to use him as an example, especially his fellow courtiers. He warned them “not to trust in the vanity of the world, and especially in the flatterings of the Court, and the favour and treacheries of Fortune”, which he said raised men up only to “dash them again upon the ground”. He blamed fortune for his current pitiful condition - or rather, he blamed himself, saying he had leaned too heavily on fortune, “who hath proved herself fickle and false unto me”. He said he prayed for the mercy of God, and that he forgave all men. He begged forgiveness of God and of anyone he might have offended. He begged those present to ask anyone not there to forgive him if he had offended them, and he told them that “having lived the life of a sinner, I would fain die a Christian man.”

There has been much speculation in the latter part of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first century about what it was to which George Boleyn was referring to when he said he was a wretched sinner who deserved death, but refused to name his sins. The condemned had their families to protect, and no protestations of innocence would have been acceptable to the Crown. Besides, it was the honourable thing to accept that death was deserved. The Christian doctrine was that we are all sinners deserving of death because of original sin. The shame and dishonour George says he dies for is clearly the incest conviction (“with worse shame and dishonour than hath ever been heard of before”), but at no point in the speech does he make an admission of the offence of which he had been found guilty.

Though one of the sins he refers to, but does not mention, is suggested to be sodomy, there is no evidence for this. George Cavendish suggests that George was referring to promiscuity. This may have been partly true, but the behaviour for which he apologises could refer to an amalgamation of supposed sins. Although George did not ask for the King’s forgiveness, he did ask forgiveness of anyone whom he might have offended. Indeed, he went further than this and virtually begged for forgiveness. As a Christian man about to face death, he would have been acutely aware of his flaws and faults. He was proud, and totally lacked humility. He was typically ruthless and self-seeking for a man of the age. He sat at the trial of Thomas More and was present at the appalling executions of the Carthusian monks, despite his protestations of being a “Christian man”. He showed no sympathy or compassion towards Catherine of Aragon or her daughter Mary. We do not know how he treated his wife, but his reputation as a high-living womaniser would support the notion that he was not ideal husband material. He had even turned his back on his sister Mary in her hour of need. When facing death, George Boleyn, a highly intelligent and religious man, would have been painfully aware of these failings. Hence his speech went above and beyond that which was expected of him.

He admitted he had relied too heavily on fortune and trusted too much in the vanity of the world and the flattery of the court. His positions of favour and power had resulted in sycophantic flattery by friends and enemies alike, and he had swallowed it whole. He had waltzed around the court with an air of arrogance in the certainty of his position, and because of his confidence in himself and the respect in which he was held. Yet those same people who had fawned over him were here now, watching him die. It was all false, and only at the very end did he realise this.

In his speech he went on to highlight his religious convictions, as previously quoted in the chapter on religion, before finishing by praying “God save the King”. Knowing the sort of irreverence to which George Boleyn was prone, this last sentence could be read with a great deal of irony; but whatever was happening to him, his upbringing would never have allowed him to think ill of the King. As far as George was concerned, this was his own fault.

Following his speech, he calmly and courageously knelt down, placed his head on the block, and submitted his neck to the axe. His head was removed with a single stroke, and his severed head was held up to the crowd as the executioner intoned the words, “So ends the lives of all the King’s enemies.” George Boleyn had many faults, but treason had never been one of them, and Henry must have known that. None of the men’s heads were put on display on spikes, as was usual with convicted traitors; this would surely have been the case if Henry seriously thought they were guilty, just as Thomas Culpeper’s would be five years later. It was the only small consideration that Henry showed his innocent friends. George’s body and head were taken to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower, where his sister would join him two days later. The other men were buried in two graves, two men in each, in the chapel graveyard.

It is unlikely, as Chapuys alleges, that Anne was forced to watch the executions of her brother and friends, but she may have seen the men congregated together before they were marched out of the Tower - perhaps allowing her one last look at her beloved brother. One man who did witness the executions was Thomas Wyatt, who was imprisoned in the Tower still and who wrote about them in verse, illustrating the danger of being too close to the throne:

“These bloody days have broken my heart.

My lust, my youth did them depart,

And blind desire of estate.

Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.

Of truth, circa Regna tonat.

The Bell Tower showed me such a sight

That in my head sticks day and night.

There did I learn out of a grate,

For all favour, glory, or might,

That yet, circa Regna tonat.”

In a way this verse reiterates the words of George Boleyn on the scaffold, when he warned his listeners not to trust the vanities of the world and the flattery of the court. His “blind desire of estate” and his “haste to climb” had led him to this end. This was certainly the passage of his speech that was specifically remembered by most of those present, particularly courtiers. On 18 September 1536, John Husee had cause to write to Lady Lisle, “but now I remember my Lord of Rochford’s words, who exhorted every man to beware of the flattering of the court.” There was many a young courtier who heard those words with trepidation.

George’s body and head were taken to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower, where his sister would join him two days later.

(Taken from George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier andDiplomat)

Notes and Sources

* Bentley, Samuel, ed. Excerpta Historica Or, Illustrations of English History. London, 1831, pp. 261–5.

*  LP x. 908

* Constantine, George. Archaeologia, Or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity. Vol. 23. ed. T Amyot, The Society, 1831, pp. 64-6.

*  Gruffudd, Elis. “Gruffudd’s Chronicle”. The National Library of Wales.

*  St Clare Byrne, Muriel, ed. The Lisle Letters. Vol. 3. University of Chicago Press, 1981, p491.

* The Chronicle of Calais In the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII to the Year 1540 (ed. Gough Nichols, John).

* Thomas, William, The Pilgrim, London, 1861, pp.116-17

* Wriothesley, Charles. A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559. ed. Camden Society 1875., pp. 39-40.

COMPETITION

Win a signed copy of George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier and Diplomat by Clare Cherry and Claire Ridgway by answering this question. Please submit your answers like a comment, complete with your e-mail address; neither will be published. But when we use a generator to randomly select a winner from the entrants, it'll be helpful to have your e-mail address for me to let you know you've won! The e-mail addresses, perhaps needless to say, will not be passed on to any third parties. (Also please leave comments about the article, with any of your own thoughts or queries about George Boleyn, Lord Rochford. It's always a pleasure for authors to hear from people interested in their work!)
QUESTION: George Boleyn's sister Anne was played by English actress Natalie Dormer in the Showtime series "The Tudors". What is the name of the queen she is currently playing in HBO's medieval fantasy "Game of Thrones"? 

The competition closes on Thursday 12th June 2014. Thank you.

Review: "Inside the Tudor Court" by Lauren Mackay

I once came across a comment on-line from Lauren Mackay fairly highlighting the difference between a blogger and an historian, and rather self-deprecatingly pointing out that having achieved her masters she did not yet consider herself an historian. It is therefore something of a relief that she has since used the work undertaken for her MA to pen this wonderful biography of Eustace Chapuys, the Hapsburgs' ambassador to England for most of the last two decades of Henry VIII's reign.

In much the same way as Chapuys' negative appraisal of Anne Boleyn helped shape her historiography for so many years, the academic swing in her favour following Eric Ives's 1986 biography saw Chapuys cast in the light of a malign intriguer who got more wrong than right when it came to Boleyn - and, by an extension of logic, everyone around her. Mackay sets out to rescue her subject from this two-dimensional view and she does so with great success. If Anne Boleyn was much more than suggested by Chapuys, he too is worth a lot more than the Anne Boleyn matter. The biography brims with the author's passion for her subject, beginning with a charming and vivid account of his home town in Annecy, where he is still commemorated in street names and local architecture. Mackay does well too where the sources are silent by sketching the broad outlines of his life before he was sent to England in 1529, freely admitting that there is much we do not know about Chapuys's life but credibly suggesting various possibilities based on what we do know. It's what all Tudor historians have to do from time to time, it's full of pitfalls and Mackay does better than most in weaving her way through it. Once Chapuys gets to England, where his legal training was intended to help the beleagured Katherine of Aragon, Mackay is able to make use of the mountains of letters that her subject wrote to the Emperor and the picture becomes clearer still.

Mackay's strengths are not just her zeal for the thin and rather elegant man she's writing about, but also her ability to analyse his thoughts and to make full use of his lengthy and colourful correspondence. She is right when she points out that without Chapuys's letters Tudor history, as we know it, would not exist. There were a few times when I did not agree with her conclusions and I thought there were one or two moments when she was slightly too prepared to take Chapuys at face value. However on moments when I, or any reader, might disagree with Mackay's conclusions on certain minor points they are still well-argued and well-written enough to be taken seriously and respected. There are no unreasonable assessments in Inside the Tudor Court and she presents the information clearly enough that she allows her readers to make their own conclusions. She invites them, as it were, to share her enthusiasm for Charles V's servant.

This is a wonderfully useful book that brings to life the colourful and often confusing world of the Henrician court, as seen through the eyes of one of its most gifted if controversial observers. Lauren Mackay deserves considerable praise for setting Chapuys back in his context and reminding us, regardless of whom he quarrelled with or why, what a debt we all owe him. She makes him both an esteemed intellectual but entirely human, she allows him her foibles - I particularly enjoyed the point she makes about his correspondence's relative lack of descriptions of the English court's numerous entertainments: he didn't enjoy them and thought them slightly frivolous, so he told the Emperor he wouldn't bore him with the details. There has long been a need for a biography of this brilliant and complex figure and Lauren Mackay has certainly delivered it.

Missing Royals and Murder Mysteries: Anastasia and the allure of romance

The story of Anastasia Romanov is one of the great melodramas of royal history. In life, the real Grand Duchess Anastasia was the teenage daughter of Russia’s deposed emperor, Nicholas II. Her father had lost his throne during the revolution of 1917 and the entire family had subsequently been deported to Siberia. In July 1918, they were herded into a cellar and shot by local Communists. Their bodies were then stripped, doused in acid, hurled down a mineshaft and buried in a forest. In 1991, geologists announced they had discovered the bodies and surviving releatives of the Romanovs - including Britain's Prince Philip - were asked to provide DNA samples to help with the identification.

But between 1918 and 1991, no one knew, for sure, what had really happened to the Romanovs. The dishonesty and habitual secretiveness of the Soviet Union, the absence of the family’s corpses and rampant media speculation led to rumours that one, or more, of the Imperial Family had survived the massacre. By the 1920s, attention had narrowed to a single candidate – the youngest of the Tsar’s daughters, Anastasia, who had been seventeen at the time of her alleged murder. 

Why Anastasia became the centre of the greatest conspiracy theory of the twentieth century is hard to say. Maybe it was because the name ‘Anastasia’ has links to the theme of resurrection in the Russian language or maybe because it was the unconscious allure of the youngest princess (a favourite phrase in fairy stories.) For whatever reason, it was Anastasia who became fixed in the public’s mind as the 'one who got away,' whilst her three sisters faded into the history books as victims of the October Revolution. 

In time, the most famous of all the pretenders was a woman who travelled under the false name of ‘Anna Anderson,’ and who had first made the claim that she was Anastasia when she was recovering in a German mental asylum after a failed suicide bid in 1920. Anderson’s claim attracted global attention and she prosecuted the longest court case in European history trying to have her claim legally recognised. Some of her supporters included the Duke of Leuchtenberg, the Kaiser’s aging daughter-in-law Crown Princess Cecilia, the children of the doctor who had died alongside the royals in 1918, Anastasia’s childhood playmate who was now a wealthy American socialite called Xenia Leeds, the famous composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, the real Anastasia’s cousin Grand Duke Andrei, and, later, several prominent historians. However, there were notable dissenters – not least amongst them Prince Felix Yusupov, who called Anderson ‘an adventuress’ and ‘a horrible creature,’ the real Anastasia’s godmother the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the real Anastasia’s cousin Princess Irina, several of the Tsarina’s surviving ladies-in-waiting, the real Anastasia’s French tutor Pierre Gilliard, the real Anastasia’s nursemaid Shura Tegleva, and the real Anastasia’s uncle Ernest, the deposed Grand Duke of Hesse. Ernest in particular became so incensed by Anderson that he spent years obsessively tracking down who she might really be instead. Eventually, he put forward the theory that Anna wasn’t a Russian princess at all, but a missing Polish factory worker called Franziska Schanskowska.

Anderson’s claim, and her court case, helped ensure Anastasia’s place in popular legend. The myth spawned several plays and movies – including the magnificent Oscar-winning Anastasia in 1956 (above), in which Anderson was played by Ingrid Bergman and her Danish grandmother was played by the ‘queen of Broadway,’ Helen Hayes; there was also a 2-part television movie in 1986, Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna, which had an impressive all-star cast that included first-time-actor Christian Bale (as Anastasia’s younger brother, Alexei), Amy Irving as Anna Anderson, Rex Harrison (in his last movie) as Grand Duke Cyril Romanov, Gone with the Wind’s Olivia de Havilland as Anastasia’s royal grandmother, Brideshead Revisited’s Claire Bloom as the Tsarina Alexandra and Oscar-winner Omar Shariff as Tsar Nicholas II. And, of course, there was the romantic 1997 musical cartoon Anastasia (below), with the voices of Meg Ryan, Kelsey Grammer, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Lloyd, John Cusack, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters and Kirsten Dunst. 

However, it is now absolutely impossible for any rational human being to persist in the belief that Anastasia Romanov lived beyond the massacre of 17th July, 1918. If she did survive the initial gunfire, she did so only by a matter of hours. When the bodies of the Romanovs were first unveiled to the world in 1991, it did admittedly seem as if Anna Anderson (below) might have been telling the truth, because two were missing. Scientists eventually confirmed that the absent corpses belonged to one of the Tsar’s daughters and to his only son, Alexei. Even by the time the bodies were ceremonially reburied in the Romanovs’ splendid Saint Petersburg crypt in 1998, the two missing skeletons had still not been found. Admittedly, many scientists insisted that the real Anastasia’s body was actually one of those being buried and that the missing princess was her elder sister, 19 year-old Maria. Supporters of Anderson responded by claiming that Maria and Anastasia had been so close in age and physical appearance that the scientists had mistaken Maria’s body for that of her younger sister – who, they believed, had survived the massacre, lived under the name Anna Anderson and died in Virginia at the age of eighty-three in 1984. 

But ten years later, in 2008, the last two royal bodies were discovered near the original burial pit. One of the Romanovs’ executioners had left records indicating that they had desperately tried to burn two of the bodies and, eventually, scientists were able to confirm his testimony. The bodies of Maria and Alexei Romanov were discovered near the site of the fire and at some point they will presumably rejoin their family in their Saint Petersburg tomb. In a final twist, DNA tests on a surviving scrap of intestine left from an operation undergone by Anna Anderson in the 1970s confirmed that Anastasia’s seemingly-paranoiac uncle Ernest had been right all along. Anderson wasn’t related to the Romanovs, but she was related to the Schanskowska family. Anna Anderson may have ended her life claiming to be the daughter of a tsar, but she had started it as the daughter of a penniless Polish factory worker.

Anderson’s claims have therefore been conclusively debunked and the body of the real Grand Duchess Anastasia rests inside the Peter and Paul Fortress of Saint Petersburg. But, incredibly, there are still those who refuse to accept that Anastasia died alongside the rest of her family in 1918 or that Anderson was nothing more than an extraordinarily gifted fraudster. What they're arguing is logically impossible, so why continue to cling to a belief that science and history have both debunked?

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that Anastasia was the last of a trinity of royal mysteries that have exercised and excited our curiosity for centuries. The other two are the missing Princes in the Tower and the ‘lost king of France,’ little Louis XVII, who disappeared at the height of the French Revolution. They died centuries apart, but there are similarities in their cases and in why they should still be studied today.

I don't believe that the princes in the Tower (above) survived or that they ever left its walls after 1483. If Richard III had shown unexpected clemency by allowing one, or both, to leave in the months after he became king, then it’s hard to see why he wouldn’t have paraded them through the streets when his regime was slowly being eroded by claims that he had murdered them. Furthermore, why would their mother agree to a scheme that would place Henry Tudor on the throne if she knew that her sons were still alive? There is, above all, absolutely no evidence – none whatsoever – that points to them having lived beyond 1483. There is plenty of passionate speculation, but nothing else. Bodies that are almost certainly theirs were discovered within the Tower’s walls in exactly the place that Saint Thomas More had said they were in, in his excoriating biography of their uncle. It’s too big a coincidence to dismiss. And, finally, if they did leave the Tower then where did they go after 1483? Narnia?

Louis XVII (above) died in horrible conditions, after months of physical and psychological abuse. He was ten years-old at the time and both his parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, had already gone to the guillotine. He was autopsied in the prison but then he was almost certainly hurled into a mass grave. We have no idea where and probably never will. It is only because his heart was removed during the autopsy that tests were able to be performed in the twenty-first century that confirmed that Louis had indeed died in prison in 1795. 

And as for Anastasia: if eyewitness accounts of the Imperial Family’s murder are to be believed, she died towards the end of the massacre, after being repeatedly beaten and stabbed by Bolshevik soldiers. 

These are the awful, hideous, heartbreaking facts behind the three greatest mysteries in royal history and a million miles removed from the fairy tales they have spawned.

All four of these young royals – Edward V, his brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Louis XVII and Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia – disappeared in times of turmoil and secrecy. Richard III could not reveal what he had done with the boys, or allowed to be done to them, without fears of toppling his own regime. The French Republic felt that drawing attention to the appalling treatment the little boy had suffered in jail would only inflame royalist sympathies and the fledgling Bolshevik movement were concerned that Kaiser Wilhelm II would back-out of his recent truce with them if he discovered what had happened to his cousins. The myths about their survival are therefore perfectly explicable by a process of historical logic: initially, no one knew exactly what had happened to them which led to them speculating about possible explanations. I suspect, of course, that it’s more than that and that the reason why so many people believed, or believe, in these fantastic tales of  imperial survival is because the allure of fairy stories never quite leaves us – however hard we try. We want to believe in royal glamour, excitement, danger and happily-ever-afters. We want to believe, I suppose, in some form of magic. 

What do we do with these stories, though, once we know they’ve been disproved? (In Anastasia’s case, and Louis XVII’s, definitively; in the case of Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, by all laws of probability.) Well, as a writer, I see nothing wrong in continuing to dramatize them. As long as you don’t get so caught up in your own fiction that you try to mislead people, I still think there’s a place for stories of lost princes and princesses. And why not? When I think of Edward, Richard, Louis and Anastasia, I often hear the words of poor Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement: ‘What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness.’ Robbed of a real life by their families' enemies, I suppose that there is a kind of kindness in giving these children a fictional afterlife. 

But the historian in me wants people to see that the real stories of these children are important in their own right. They are celebrity poster-children against what we are capable of, but shouldn’t be. They’re what happens when politics runs amok. Edward V and his little brother perished at the end of a brutalising century, in which political corruption and ruthless communal ambition had warped the moral fabric of an entire generation. Louis XVII and Anastasia Romanov died because their very existence was inconvenient to a new form totalitarian form of politics. The children did not ‘fit’ into the revolutions’ grand new vision of the world. As a result, in a world without compromise, they were expendable. Leon Trotsky himself dismissed Anastasia’s murder with a shrug, boasting that the horror it had caused would help unite the Red Army in fear behind the Communist cause. What we should be doing now is not focusing too much on what might have happened, but on what did happen. These dead children matter because their fates illuminate the fates of so many others who we now know only by statistics; they give us warnings, not just about politics but about the nature of humanity. Reflecting on the death of Louis XVII, one French royalist lamented that the child had been cut down ‘on the threshold of life.’ These four children died horribly, they died unfairly and they died illegally. Their stories should remind us that we should never go too far in the name of politics, to never cheapen our respect for the sanctity of human life and to remind us that we should never turn our backs on protecting the weak and the vulnerable.