Flodden Field, or: Arthur's Ghost (again)

Something big happened 500 years ago today.  The Kingdom of Scotland was at war with the Kingdom of England.  The armies met near Branxton in the English county of Northumberland.  The Scottish king, James IV (pictured), became the last British monarch to die in battle.  Apart from which, the losses - especially on the Scottish side - were enormous.

Towards the very end of The King Arthur Conspiracy I refer to this battle and, in particular, to a curious incident which took place beforehand.

James IV was probably the last Gaelic speaker to rule over Scotland.  Legends tell of him disguising himself in order to mingle with the ordinary citizens and find out what their lives were really like - something which William Shakespeare seems to have picked up on and reminded James VI of Scotland and I of England when he wrote Measure for Measure (the Duke in that play is clearly based on King James; Shakespeare apparently wanted to draw his sovereign's attention to what a popular monarch his predecessor had been).

The fourth King James of Scotland was also rather chivalrous.  This proved to be his downfall.  He gave King Henry VIII of England a couple of weeks notice that he was about to invade.  Which was very decent of him.  But it meant that the English were prepared.  The chivalry, it would seem, went only one way.

Just before he set out to meet his destiny on an English battlefield in 1513, James IV went to church in Linlithgow.  Sometime later, George Sinclair, professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow, described what happened there.

The king was "at his Devotions" when an "Ancient Man came in, his Amber coloured Hair hanging down upon his Shoulders, his forehead high, and inclining to Baldness, his Garments of Azure colour, somewhat long, girded about with a Towel, or Table-Napkin, of a Comely and very Reverend Aspect."

The "Ancient Man" approached the king and addressed him thus:

"Sir, I am sent hither to entreat you, to delay your Expedition for this time, and to proceed no further in your intended journey: for if you do, you shall not prosper in your enterprise, nor any of your followers.  I am further charged to warn you, not to use the acquaintance, company, or counsel of women, as you tender your honour, life, and estate."

Naturally, the bystanders were intrigued by this person and many were eager to speak with him after the service.  But the "apparition" disappeared, "having in a manner vanished in their hands".

The "apparition" clearly cut a striking figure.  The description of the Ancient Man's hair seems authentic enough: the high forehead, "inclining to Baldness", with the hair flowing long at the back of the head, is instantly reminiscent of the Druidic tonsure, which was also adopted by the early Christians of the Celtic Church.  In contrast to the Roman tonsure of St Peter (the familiar shaved crown of the medieval monk), the Celts shaved their foreheads from ear to ear; the hair at the back of the head was allowed to grow long.

The lengthy "Azure" garments are also reminiscent of an early-5th century description of the Ancient Britons.  The court poet Claudian described a personified Britain as wearing the skin of some Caledonian [i.e. Scottish] beast, "her cheeks tattooed, and an azure cloak, rivalling the swell of ocean, sweeping to her feet".

So this phantom "Ancient Man" was ... well, pretty ancient, really.  And, as I suggest in my book on the original Arthur, he was possibly still trying to defend his homeland and his people against the English, just as Arthur himself had striven to hold back the tide of the Anglian advance.  Even his remarks about trusting women have a poignancy about them (Arthur, his comrades and his people, were ultimately ruined by the perfidy of a woman - namely, his wife).

We'll never know, of course.  But I do find it telling that the last Gaelic-speaking King of Scotland, and the last British monarch to die in battle, was warned by an "Ancient Man" not to put himself so recklessly in jeopardy.  A Gaelic-speaking war-lord who also died in battle, perhaps?  One who returned from the spirit world because the same fatal mistakes were about to be made?

But he was ignored.  And on 9 September 1513, King James's army of 30,000 Scots was routed at the Battle of Flodden Field.  The "rent surcoat of the King of Scots stained with blood" was sent to King Henry VIII as a trophy.

Nearly a thousand years had passed since Arthur fell victim to similar circumstances.  King James really should have heeded his ancestor.

Fire at the Globe

400 years ago today, the first Globe theatre was destroyed by fire.

But was it an accident?


The afternoon of Tuesday, 29 June 1613, was warm and sunny. Crowds crossed the River Thames to see William Shakespeare's latest play, All is True.  It was a lavish production: expensive costumes had been donated and real cannons were used.  These cannons were discharged at a key moment in the action - just as King Henry VIII was about to meet and fall in love with Anne Boleyn.

A courtier, Sir Henry Wotton, received a report on what happened.  Some "paper, or other stuff" from one of the cannons "did light on the thatch".  At first, it was thought "but an idle smoke".  The audience was too preoccupied with the pageantry on the stage to take much notice.  But the fire "kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds."

There were no casualties - apart from a man whose breeches caught fire; fortunately, he had a bottle of ale to hand with which he doused the flames.  The Globe Theatre, though, was ruined.  Its timbers had in fact been recycled from the earlier Theatre, built in 1576, and so nearly four decades of theatrical tradition had come to a fiery end.

Ten years later, another fire tore through the lodgings occupied by Ben Jonson.  Shakespeare's great literary rival responded to the destruction of his books and manuscripts with a mock-serious poem, which he entitled An Execration Upon Vulcan.

Addressing the lame Roman "Lord of Fire", Jonson recalled the earlier fire at the Globe - or what he chose to call Vulcan's "cruel Stratagem, / (Which, some are pleas'd to stile but thy mad Pranck), / Against the Globe'.  Jonson claimed to have seen "the Glory of the Bank" destroyed, but confided that other accounts of how the fire started had been gossiped about at the time:

Nay, sigh'd, ah Sister 'twas the Nun, Kate Arden
Kindled the Fire!  But, then one did return,
No Fool would his own harvest spoil, or burn!

"If that were so," Jonson continued, "thou rather would'st advance / The Place, that was thy Wives Inheritance."

It's always difficult to know how far Ben Jonson's tongue was in his cheek.  But subtlety was never his strong point.  A "Nun" - Kate Arden - might have "Kindled the Fire", even though in doing so he spoilt his own "harvest" and burnt his wife's "Inheritance".

Officially, there were no nuns in Protestant England.  Jonson was presumably referring to a Bankside whore, although he gave her the name of William Shakespeare's home region and his mother's family - and then promptly changed her sex!  Whoever Jonson was hinting at had a financial interest in the Globe ("thy Wives Inheritance") and was tarred with the brush of "Popery".

So could it be that the fire which destroyed the Globe 400 years ago was started deliberately, as Jonson seems to have been suggesting?  And, if so, why?

Perhaps it had something to do with the play that was being performed that afternoon.  Although All is True - or, as it is better known today, Henry VIII - was credited to William Shakespeare, much of the text had been rewritten by John Fletcher, the son of a former Bishop of London, who had the rare distinction of being "loved" by Ben Jonson.  Fletcher's revisions had turned Shakespeare's play about the beginnings of the English Reformation into a rather crude piece of Protestant propaganda.

It might be no coincidence that the theatre was burned down on the traditional feast day of St Peter, the very first "Bishop of Rome".  Nor that Ben Jonson should have been reminded of this "mad Pranck" when his own library was incinerated just a month before the First Folio of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, over which Jonson had tried to wield editorial control, appeared in print.

The fires of 1613, which destroyed Shakespeare's Globe, and 1623, which ravaged Jonson's study, provide glimpses into an age of sectarian strife.  The accepted account of the fire at the Globe pretends that there was no ideological warfare going on - a false pretence maintained, to this day, by Shakespeare scholars.  But Ben Jonson could not keep a secret.

It was no accident but a "cruel Stratagem" that razed the first Globe Theatre, four hundred years ago.

The High Priesthood

David Starkey has appeared in the Telegraph newspaper, slamming historical novelists who - he feels - have no "authority".

Odd ... doesn't an author automatically have authority?  Isn't that what being an author means?

Anyway, why should we be bothered about what David Starkey says?  He just seems to be a bit miffed because the BBC has produced a documentary about Anne Boleyn, to which Starkey has contributed.  But so have Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory.  They might be award-winning and extremely successful novelists specialising in Tudor history (which Starkey reckons is his preserve), but Starkey doesn't rate them.

Now, there are two ways we could look at this.  Starkey had the bad grace to dismiss the work of Mantel and Gregory as "chick lit", which it isn't. So the problem might well be that David Starkey just doesn't like women very much - especially gifted and intelligent women who take their historical research seriously and sell more books than he does.

But I think there's more to it than that.  It has to do with the "High Priesthood" of historical studies.  This is a (largely) self-appointed elite which likes to pretend that it has all the answers.  If you want to know about the Tudors, Starkey's your man.  Whatever you do, don't go talking to anybody else about them (least of all a woman).

So what, we might ask, is the worst that could happen if somebody was imprudent or wayward enough to consult someone other than David Starkey?  After all, Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory have immersed themselves in the period in question, living imaginatively in Tudor times and recreating that world in painstaking detail.  What could possibly be so WRONG about picking their wonderful brains?

The answer might well be that you would glean information and opinions which have not been authorised by Mr Starkey.

David Starkey insists (in the Telegraph) that high profile historical novelists "have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources" and he'd rather they "stayed off my patch as a historian."  Harsh words, you might feel, and utterly unwarranted.  Not least of all because Starkey's own view of history - and the Tudor period in particular - is so relentlessly reactionary.  He is the Conservative Party's idea of a historian - imperialistic, bombastic, borderline racist and sexist, a man who actually believes that Henry VIII was our best monarch (and not an obese, syphilitic monster with some pretty alarming personality defects).

Maybe this brings us a little closer to the heart of the matter.  If David Starkey is going to succeed in hoodwinking us all into buying into his extreme right-wing approach to British history, he has to stop us hearing from such novelists as Mantel and Gregory who give us a pretty crisp idea of what the key figures of the Tudor period might have been really like.  After all, it's easy to say that Henry VIII or his daughter, Elizabeth I, were marvellous monarchs.  But once a little bit of research is carried out, and you begin to suspect that the one was mad and the other was profoundly neurotic, his simplistic "Rule, Britannia!" view of the Tudors starts to look a little bit shaky. 

Or worse - it starts to look plain WRONG.  We might begin to wonder whether the version of events which David Starkey was so eager to promote is a little (how shall we say this?) misleading.  It is an entirely one-sided view.  An extremely political view.  Not history, as such, so much as propaganda.

The past is of enormous importance.  If we don't understand the past, we cannot truly understand the present (and ourselves) and we can't really figure out what kind of trajectory we're on.  But whoever controls the present tends to control the past - and for the last thirty or forty years, the past (like the present) has been controlled by the ideological reactionaries, the neo-liberals, the right-wing fundamentalists.

What this means is that the David Starkey school of history has been given a prominence that it does not rightly deserve.  It suits the Michael Gove idea of history ("facts" ruthlessly pruned of context and regurgitated in order to produce a generation of flag-waving drones).  And it can only be sustained by the systematic exclusion of whole reams of facts, vast piles of historical evidence, which doesn't support such a biased, revisionist interpretation.

In other words, the Conservative school of history doesn't hold sources to be quite as sacrosanct as David Starkey pretends.  It is extremely selective in its use of sources.  Basically, only those sources which support its rightward-leaning stance are admitted.  Anything (nay, everything) else is ignored.

Which is why we mustn't be allowed to hear from people who aren't David Starkey - because they might not play by the rules of the reactionary and revisionist "history-as-we-want-it-to-be-not-as-it-actually-was" school of historiography.

All this is absolutely pertinent to my forthcoming publication.  Twenty-five years of research went into the writing of Who Killed William Shakespeare?  It wouldn't have taken that long - indeed, it wouldn't have needed to be written at all - if historians hadn't been so adept at hiding the evidence which doesn't suit their particular prejudices.  The image of William Shakespeare which has been sold repeatedly, over and over again, in a succession of identikit biographies, comes straight from the David Starkey school.  It is based on the most selective choice of sources. 

The greater part of the available historical information about William Shakespeare doesn't really make it into the "authorised" biography because it doesn't fit the approved portrait of Shakespeare as a talented (and thoroughly patriotic) Mr Nobody.  And so a cabal exercises supreme control over what we are allowed to know and to think about Shakespeare, because any deviation from the consensus threatens to blow the lid on what Shakespeare's life and times were really like.

David Starkey - with his sanitised, God-Save-the-Queen approach to the Tudors - comes from the same school of historical make-believe as the High Priests of Shakespeare Studies.  It is important to such people that their view is the only one available - even if it doesn't make sense!  Like the Church in the Middle Ages, it approves publications which bear no relation whatsoever to evidence-based reality while condemning anything and everything which doesn't square with its own narrow ideological view.

In that regard, David Starkey's pompous little gripe about historical novelists is entirely in keeping with a historiographical movement which has devoted huge amounts of time and energy to completely rewriting the past in order to make it fit into an idealised kind of reactionary nationalism.

Talking to other people - especially articulate and imaginative writers - about the subject can only upset the demagogues like Starkey and the Shakespeare clique.  Because you might just find yourself looking at their beloved subjects from a more sane and realistic point-of-view.