The Crown and other Faction

History is a wonderful subject to study. It has almost endless scope and massive capacity for generating both interest and insight. We can all benefit from a greater exposure to it. I have an ambition to devote more of the next phase of my life to studying history, and I fully expect to enjoyment and learning to result. Luckily, there are many and growing ways to pursue this goal, though there are also some pitfalls.

I remember school history rather vaguely. I think in the early years history was dominated by appealing stories such as the Pharaohs or Aztecs, with more focus on providing visual images than anything else. I can hardly remember any history from middle school, apart from lots of maps of the world with countries coloured pink to show the rapidly diminishing British Empire.

I have greater recollection from High School. In early grades there was some depth of focus into various eras of British history, including the Tudors. Then my GSCE history course covered European history from 1970-1945, encompassing revolution in Russia and two world wars. There was even a module of British domestic history of the same era, looking at things like the battle for universal suffrage, labour power and the general strike and the immediate post-war era with Beveridge and Butler reforms of welfare and education and the creation of the NHS. But 1951 was the far limit of study. At sixteen I dropped history for a focus on just maths and economics.

School history taught me a lot of facts (all the English monarchs from 1066 and their dates, for example), and, more usefully, served to offer some context for current affairs. I think my history teachers were quite good and even took a few risks – I remember one class discussion about the merits of capital punishment, which usefully served to challenge prejudices.

I think I was fairly lucky. My syllabus was more relevant by being fairly modern. My teachers were good and took some risks. And in Britain at the time history was taught with less dogma than in other countries or in earlier times. I can be grateful that my study did enough to ignite an interest much later in life.

But it still missed many opportunities. A curriculum with history retained up to age eighteen would have been better. The focus on facts was limiting. And there was still too much dogma and prejudice and even propaganda involved. This manifested itself in gross oversimplification. Lenin had some good ideas but turned bad. Hitler was the devil incarnate, so any discussion about how Germans came to support him or whether any policies had merit had to be stifled.

A great example of subtle propaganda was the Munich agreement and the portrayal of poor old Neville Chamberlain. Hitler had to be only bad, and Churchill all good, so Chamberlain must have been weak. Appeasement became a bad word on the back of it, which very much suited the military establishment and politicians trying to sell a MAD policy against the Russians. Of course, the reality of Chamberlain and Munich was much more complex, and I’m delighted that Robert Harris will soon be publishing a novel about that moment in time. Harris is always entertaining and well researched – I love all his writing. I still recall the first article I ever read of his, in the Observer, which introduced me to the concept of the elephant in the room with such elegance that I became an instant lifelong fan.

Harris often uses a technique that some have called faction. His novels are neither fiction nor documentary but some sort of blend. Usually some minor characters are elevated to the centre of the story, and their role embellished creatively to make an entertaining backdrop to real historical events. The major characters are portrayed rather accurately, at least as Harris perceives them.

This is a fresh way to look at history, and others have used the same technique. Perhaps the most masterful of all so far has been Hillary Mantel with Wolf Hall and Bring out the Bodies, in which the events are seen through the lens of a middling character, Thomas Cromwell. I am delighted that PBS has just started repeats of the TV series based on those great books – I could watch it again and again.

Another example is the Netflix series The Crown. A common factor is the wonderful Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn and Queen Elizabeth, two queens of England five hundred years apart, one reigning barely a year and the other at sixty-five not out.

The Crown is inherently more risky and more edgy, dealing as it does with events and characters still alive and fresh in the mind and suffused with images laden with dogma and propaganda. My Tudor history studies may have been rather superficial, but at least no one was trying to use them for propaganda purposes. Wolf Hall makes neat points about the benefits of trade and research, but The Crown careers headlong into all manner of minefields.

And the writers do it brilliantly. As faction, they choose to focus only on events that are both entertaining and revealing, and it has to embellish known fact with some supposition. But it all feels very believable, and we get to understand the main characters in some depth, sharing their dilemmas. My mum would have hated it. To her, each royal had a character described by one or two words provided by the Daily Mail. She was part of the fawning crowd in the rain at the 1953 coronation, and the royal family formed a crucial part of her unthinking patriotism.

The Crown offered entertainment, knowledge and food for thought. I did not know that MacMillan was knowingly cuckolded through his professional life, that Anthony Armstrong-Jones swung both ways, that Edward VIII actively betrayed the war effort, that Wallis Simpson was probably sleeping with the Russian ambassador, and many other pieces of gossip catnip. Worthy of deeper thought are the portrayal of three successive transfers between prime minister with no democratic content whatsoever, the hypocrisy surrounding the treatment of women just two generations ago, or the enduring power of shady crown advisors.

Best of all, Foy portrays the contradictions at the heart of the role wonderfully. To succeed, a part of her has to accept the nonsense that her authority comes from God, while another part accepts that she must refrain from expressing an opinion in almost all circumstances. And we also observe the contradictions in the lives of close family, born to be entitled yet fatally caged. I found it great TV, and a better course of history than any I received at school or in books.

But that resounding success leaves a few concerns about the genre. The makers of these new faction series have a lot of power. They need to balance entertainment, knowledge and opinion, but what will regulate which knowledge and which opinion prevails? Are we replacing schoolbook propaganda with another sort? Because progressives tend to make these series, I find myself drawn to them, but am I really just feeding my own biases, creating yet another echo chamber? Will this field become the next political battlefield, with Fox sponsoring all sorts of other series with rival subliminal messages?

Of course, faction is not a new invention. Shakespeare's histories set the tone. The power and risks of the genre were apparent even then. Richard III is portrayed very negatively by Shakespeare, but my history teacher contended that England's two finest monarchs squared of in 1485 at Bosworth Field.

The age of mass communication has wonderful opportunities. Faction series are just one example of many. The next generation has a chance to embrace history in ways that were tough for me given the media and material available at the time. But it is yet one more fraught field, ripe for abuse and polarisation.