In the first chapter of The Future of the Past, “The Sphinx — Virtual and Real,” Alexander Stille reports an argument between an American conservationist and an Egyptian tour guide who specializes in “Atlantean” groups — people who believe that the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were erected by remnants of the people of Atlantis, that fair, doomed continent. As it happens, the American, Mark Lehner, started out as a believer in such New Age nonsense. Eventually, hard research changed his mind. There is a pointlessness to the argument, in that Ahmed, the Egyptian, is inclined to doubt the Atlantis “theory” as well; but there’s money in it. What, Lehner wonders (forgetting his youthful enthusiasms, perhaps), makes the bogus explanation so attractive to so many people?

We have thousands of tombs, thousands of hieroglyphs. If I climb the Pyramid with you, I can show you pottery in the mortar between the stones. We have carbon-dated it. What more do we need? You work with these people. You lecture to them. Why do people need to believe in myths? Why can’t they believe in Khufu and Khafre? It’s a great civilization. The boat of Khufu is as beautiful and sophisticated as anything produced by ancient civilizations. The statues of Menkaure and Khafre as as beautiful as anything produced by any civilization of any age. Why are they not good enough? Why do people need them to be by somebody else?

I share Lehner’s exasperation. I was reeling it with just last week, reading John Lanchester’s LRB piece on Game of Thrones. I read it because I hoped that Lanchester could explain its folly, patent in the publicity materials that have been junking up newspapers and magazines. (I will say at the outset that I never dreamed, as a boy, that I would live to see grown men discuss comic-book superheroes. I think that I just might have regarded such a forecast as more horrifying than that of a Communist take-over.) Lanchester is a sensible man; he has written not only brilliantly but lucidly about the financial disasters of the last decade. Sadly, I discovered that Lanchester is a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire — the cycle of fictions by George RR Martin — and the television adaptation. The piece would have been blather to me if not for a moment of connection with the real world: “Martin,” Lanchester writes, “has said that his ambition was to create an imaginary world with the atmosphere of the Wars of the Roses. A small number of aristocratic families are contending for power in the kingdom of Westeros, an island with a cold north….”

What, may I ask, is insufficiently interesting about the real Wars of the Roses?

This sporadic sequence of three dynastic wars, stretching over thirty years (1455-1485), that transformed England from a medieval kingdom into the foundation of a modern state, was not called by its now-popular name until the Nineteenth Century. (Was it Scott who made up the term?) The “roses” were the badges of the contending families, red for Lancaster and white for York. A weak king, whose grandfather had usurped the throne, was unable to neutralize the tensions of an aristocracy idled by the end of a disappointing war in France. Factions collected around men with claims to the throne that were arguably as good as the king’s — and who were prepared to argue with force. When the king (a Lancastrian) passed into insanity, his queen turned herself into the greatest harridan of English history by trying (often foolishly) to stand up for her husband’s interests, and those of her infant son. Scuffles and skirmishes metastasized into open rebellion, and, by 1461, a Yorkist sat on the throne. The Yorkist would in turn be ejected ten years later, but only for a short period; restored to the throne, he would rule for another dozen years. Then his teenaged son would succeed him — but only on paper. The late king’s brother was determined to seize the throne, and the young king and his brother — the “princes in the tower” — were made to disappear from this world. Two years later, a Welshman with extremely tenuous Lancastrian claims overthrew the Yorkist in a great battle. This turned out to be the end of the “wars,” but no one knew this at the time. Happily, the new king married a Yorkist princess and was very strong. So was his son. There would be a few seditious events every now and then, but by the latter part of the sixteenth century — just as France was sinking into its religious civil wars — the English monarchy was secure, at least from overmighty subjects, and an unmarried woman was able to rule the land in (domestic) peace for forty-five years. English kings and queens would no longer have to face the challenge of powerful aristocratic clans. In the future, political contentions would be waged nonviolently by men (and, later, women) who were elected, by ever more democratic constituencies, to represent the people of England in an ancient assembly called Parliament.

I have omitted all the proper names (except for those of the two factions). I have also neglected to mention the pervasiveness of the bloody violence. This was no palace coup. As we know from the Paston letters, the conflict wore a gangland face on the local level, with thugs seizing property in the name of whichever faction was prevailing at the moment. Every time I pick up a book about the Wars of the Roses, I discover some new atrocity, or at least a new snake in the grass. The constellation of titles and family names, and the endless shifts of allegiance, make it very hard to keep score, and the career of the Earl of Warwick, known as “kingmaker” after his ultimately vain attempt to restore the insane Lancastrian, is one that I find I must always re-learn. Convulsions on this scale, no doubt bewildering to live through, remain confusing on the page.

At the beginning of his career, Shakespeare rendered a sort of four-episode Game of Thrones from the records of the Wars of the Roses. The records were tendentious, and favored the Lancastrians — the Yorkists, particularly the antihero of Richard III, were drawn with a lurid brush. Shakespeare’s “history plays” are not history. But they are not fantasy, either. For the most part, his characters represent people who actually lived, and who died more or less as he said they did. These are not Shakespeare’s greatest plays by any means, but they are very good, and, if you’ll pardon the inanity of my saying so, beautifully written. Please tell me why you would prefer to watch a television show about a wholly imaginary concoction. No — don’t tell me. Just try to square it with yourself.

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Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 11th, 2013 at 12:22 pm.