Here’s another book for RIPXV!
Reading Kenilworth for the Classics Club Spin made me contemplate the question of how important it is in a historical novel to stick to the historical facts. Of course, historical novels are fiction, so by definition something is invented. And there have been really interesting historical novels where the author purposefully changed some facts to speculate on other outcomes. But do historical novels have the license, just for a more dramatic story, to change what actually happened?
Kenilworth is the novel that famously reawakened interest in the story of Amy Robsart’s death. Amy Robsart was the wife of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, during the reign of Elizabeth I. Amy’s death is the classic mystery of did she fall or was she pushed? At the time of her death, the rumor in court was that Leicester colluded in her death because he believed he could then marry Elizabeth.
In the novel, Amy is a young bride who has run away from home for a marriage with Leicester that is secret because he is afraid for his position in court, having married without royal permission. Amy’s jilted fiancé, Tressalian, comes looking for her on behalf of her father, believing that Amy was seduced away from her home by Varney, Leicester’s master of horse.
Varney is the villain of this piece. He has Amy kept as a virtual prisoner, and eventually Amy has reason to fear for her life. So, she flees to Kenilworth, Leicester’s estate, where he is preparing to entertain Elizabeth and the court.
I fear that Scott has woven a romance with very little basis in fact, as he did with a Crusader-based novel I’ll be reviewing in a few months. First, in Kenilworth, Amy and Leicester are newly married when in fact they were married about 10 years. Next, their marriage was no secret; in fact, she was allowed to visit him in the Tower of London when he was imprisoned by Queen Mary as a relative of Lady Jane Grey. Did Leicester have a hand in her death? I read a novel a while back that posited that (it may have been Alison Weir’s The Marriage Game, but I’m not sure), but we’ll never know. More recently, historians are inclined to believe that she simply fell down the stairs. By the way, she was not being kept captive in a moldy old house but visiting friends.
So, that is a strongish negative for me, at least. I could accept a premise that Leicester ordered his wife’s death because we don’t know, but playing with the chronology of the marriage for drama’s sake (and to have a younger, dewier heroine) and making it a secret (as it was also in a movie I saw several years ago) is throwing in a bit too much fiction.
On the positive side, Scott’s descriptions of the Elizabethan court are vibrant and his attempts at Elizabethan dialogue are convincing. Also, if he was not distorting history I’d say that his plot is quite suspenseful. At the time of its publication, historians slammed The Talisman just because Scott created a fictional Plantagenet, even though he did much worse things historically in that book and in this one.
whatmeread 
It’s an interesting point, I like to think I’m learning something if I’m reading anything historical as well as having a good read
Yes, not so good if you are actually learning something that’s wrong!
Find Walter Scott difficult to read. Love his journals . I admire you tackling him multiple times!
Thanks!
Interesting! I think I don’t mind if I don’t know the actual history very well, and if the author makes it sound convincing. But on the whole I’d rather authors wrote about fictional characters rather than changing historical facts.
I agree. Or write about the true facts of the case, which are interesting enough.
I haven’t read this one, but I think Scott often distorts history in his novels. In Redgauntlet, he invents a third Jacobite Rebellion which never actually happened. I don’t mind authors changing a few small facts to improve the story, but some changes are too much!
Whoa! That’s a really big change! I just read The Talisman, in which he distorts events during the Crusades, but that is marketed as a boy’s book, so I thought that might be why, that he was simplifying. Historians attacked him for creating a fictional Plantagenet, but what he did in regard to the leaders of the crusade was much worse.
Sounds like he errs more on the side of fiction than historical!
Yes!