Fact and Fiction in sixteenth century history and the rise of the historical novel

The Musketeers 

Over the last few months I have been preoccupied with investigating the history of historical fiction and its relationship to academic history for the recent IHR winter conference: Novel Approaches: From academic history to historical fiction.  The results of this investigation now form a series of blog posts on the IHR Digital blog and have also been attached to the virtual conference website that I helped to develop.  Although this is somewhat of a diversion from my own research interests (and expertise) my examination into historical fiction from the seventeenth century right through to the present does nevertheless have a resonance with my studies of sixteenth century scholars.

The historical novel developed first in France in the seventeenth century as an alternative representation of the historiographical debates over Particular and Secret histories as opposed to the more traditional universal histories.  Particular and Secret history is, in essence, a focus on individual empowerment and its role in historical causation.  The arguments suggested that historical events were caused or given form through the peculiarities of the individuals involved.  In the nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott (often claimed as the first historical novelist of modern form) drew out in his Waverley novels the historiographical debates of his time over nationhood and historical difference.  In the second half of the twentieth century the rise of postmodernism as a significant force in philosophical theory drove historians to debate whether all history was indeed historical fiction or historical truth.  The nature of ‘truths’ about the past was put under the microscope and many historians to this day conceive of the past as holding many truths and representations including the fictional.  

Back in the sixteenth century however, fiction and fact were often interchangeable.  One only has to look as far as John Foxe’s narratives and imagery of the Marian burnings to see how the two meshed together to form a truth about the past.  King N. King has written a fascinating account on the ‘literary aspects’ in the Acts and Monuments arguing that:

‘English Protestants of the early modern era readily understood that stories about the pain and suffering of martyrs provided exciting reading that afforded both edification and enjoyment’.

Foxe includes many fictional (and widely-known fictional) pieces in his Acts and Monuments.  The distinction for him was not whether or not these represented authentic historical evidence but whether they were rightly used or abused.  For instance the tales of saints in the hagiographical Golden Legend are vilified by Foxe as full of falsities and lies whilst the account of Jack Upland – which Foxe and others believed had been written by Geoffrey Chaucer – told a tale against friars and were therefore considered truthful in representing the beliefs and thoughts of a past society.

The Holinshed Chronicles produced largely as a collaborative project a short time after Foxe further supports the argument that literary elements were considered equally as valuable as historical fact.  Annabel Patterson has argued that:

‘They also had at their disposal a number of literary techniques and genres, which enliven and intensify the text they were constructing out of extremely diverse materials, but they did not make the mistake of some modern theoreticians in confusing literary methods with an endless, indiscriminate textuality’ (Patterson, p. 55)

In Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles Patterson added that sixteenth century chroniclers:

 ‘were convinced that what we call “literature” was integral to the cultural history they were compiling, an indispensable part of the record, both of the individual career and of the bildungsroman of the nation as a whole.’ (Patterson, p. 55)

Let’s deconstruct that a little.  First what is bildungsroman?  According to the Oxford English Dictionary bildungsroman means ‘a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education’.  It is a coming of age story or educational tale depicting the psychological and moral growth of a protagonist from youth to adulthood.  Patterson’s use of the term here is to suggest that Holinshed’s chronicles were forging a tale of England’s growth from childhood (medieval) to adulthood (early modern).  Patterson is also highlighting the cultural aspects of Holinshed’s chronicle.  This was not just a political record or exegesis as chronicles had been in the past; Holinshed was forging a concept of England as a nation. 

In the sixteenth century fiction and fact were often interchangeable and both were set to work towards the common goal of achieving a particular truth about the past but not necessarily concerned with the truth as we would accept it today.   History, in the sixteenth century often focused on past perceptions as well as fact and the dividing line between the two was not always clear-cut.   

Further Reading

John N. King, ‘Literary Aspects of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’,John Foxe Online (2004). 

Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994)

For my ‘history of historical fiction’ blog posts see the IHR Digital Blog or for a pdf copy and an index to the blog posts visit the A History of Historical Fiction post on the Novel Approaches website.  In addition the site contains a wonderful collection of podcasted lectures, book reviews (including one by myself on John Arden's Books of Bale novel), articles, and bibliographies.    

John Bale

John Bale (1495-1563) is a little bit of an enigma for historians.  In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry John N. King labels him as an ‘evangelical polemicist and historian’ but Bale is so much more than this.  John Bale is a scholar, a bishop, a playwright, a matryrologist, a historian, a polemicist, a bibliophile, a collector of ancient manuscripts, and more.  Bale’s profile as formed by historians is shaped in large part through his own autobiographical accounts which makes our understanding of Bale immediately complicated by biased and fictional representations.  Thus the life and career of Bale is on the one hand detailed and rich and on the other difficult to categorise and distinguish truth from fiction.     

Bale was born to a humble life in the small village of Cove, near Dunwich in Suffolk to Henry and Margaret.  He was one of several children and as such was delivered to the Carmelite Friars early in life as was often done at the time.  As a Carmelite, Bale received scholarly training at Jesus College, Cambridge and travelled to Louvain and Toulouse to carry out research into the history of his order.  By 1530 he had graduated with a DTh (Diploma in Theology) and become prior in Maldon, Essex.  Three years later he was promoted to the convent at Ipswich, then a year later to Doncaster. 

It was around this time that Bale converted to a reformist position against the Church of Rome, broke his oath to the Carmelites and married a woman (possibly a widower with a child in tow) named Dorothy.  Later in life Bale attributed his conversion to Thomas, first Baron Wentworth of Nettlestead but the exact details and chronology is unknown.  We do know that Bale was arrested on suspicion of heresy several times, first in 1534 and then again in 1537.  On the second occasion it would seem that Bale was helped out by friends such as the antiquarian John Leland and the principal secretary Thomas Cromwell, whom Bale had begun to work for as chief playwright of evangelical plays.  In 1536 he finally left the Carmelites for good, taking the post of a stipendiary priest at Thorndon in Suffolk. 

In 1539 Bale was forced into exile due to the major shift in religious policy by Henry VIII but upon the succession of Edward VI, Bale was given the post of Bishop of Ossary in Ireland.  This post proved difficult for Bale and upon the succession of Mary he was forced to flee for his life and travel abroad for a second period of exile.  Upon the succession of Elizabeth I, Bale (now quite elderly) was appointed a canon at Canterbury Cathedral where he died in late 1563. 

Bales major contribution to the reformation can be found in his polemical plays (especially his adaptation of King Johan), in his evangelical appraisal and appropriation for an English audience the continental apocalyptic tradition which argued that human history had been predicted in scripture and that the rise and fall of the Roman Catholic Church had been prophesised (The Image of Bothe Churches), and in his detailed catalogues of English writers and texts.  The latter work, of which there are two editions, is named the Catalogus and contains the results of extensive research into England’s historical source material.  The Catalogus was also as much theological polemic as it was catalogue: containing a complex history of the papacy and its fall to the antichrist (later republished as the Acta Romanorum pontificum).

In addition Bale wrote several martyrological accounts (John Oldcastle and Anne Askew) which would later inform and influence his friend and colleague John Foxe, the author of the Acts and Monuments.  Indeed recent scholarship has unearthed a strong connection between the two men that suggests that Bale acted as mentor and encourager to Foxe’s project.  Bale also helped Matthew Parker, Queen Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury to find lost ancient manuscripts for his own evangelical “propaganda” campaign.  Finally, Bale wrote a polemical and autobiographical account of his time in Ireland (The Vocacyon of John Bale) which gives us a fascinating glimpse into Irish history and more particularly, English views of the Irish at this time. 

Historical research is increasingly finding John Bale to be an important and essential influence on English scholarship during the sixteenth-century whether through his own activities or through his publications and writings.  Bale helped to shape the English reformation on various levels but, also, helped to create the myth of protestant suffering and victory.  As in his own autobiographical accounts Bale’s works carry a certain mythological and fictive element to them.  Indeed, Lesley P. Fairfield, one of Bale’s many modern biographers called Bale ‘mythmaker for the English Reformation’.  Such a title for a biography at once gets to the crux of Bale and offers us a warning not to examine him and his work without a significant amount of caution.         

The use of sources

Annabel Patterson,
Reading Holinshed's
Chronicles (1994)

Over the last month or so I have been reading Annabel Patterson's 1994 book Reading Holinshed's Chronicles.  Here is the first of several thoughts I have on the subjects that she brings up. 

In her chapter on Protocols Patterson discusses the multivocality in Holinshed in some detail.  The marginalia contained notes to sources where relevant although these were far from complete.  Holinshed himself noted that he had ‘rather chosen to shew the diversitie’ of opinion among those sources that he relied upon rather than ‘by over-ruling them…to frame them to agree to [his] liking’ (Patterson, p.35).  Patterson notes that other histories written in the sixteenth century (such as that by Hall, Grafton and More) gave lip service to referencing sources although the re-issue of Fabian’s chronicles in 1559 did contain additional marginalia that noted the original source material.  Perhaps, then the protocol of noting sources in the margins was beginning to take shape as early as the 1550s.  Certainly John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments, added copious marginalia noting his sources although these were often far from an accurate guide to what he had actually used.  For instance, many if not all his references to the Venerable Bede derived from other sources (prominently John Bale’s recent catalogue of English writers) and not from a copy of Bede at all.  In my researches on Foxe I could find no evidence that he had ever actually read Bede’s ecclesiastical history for himself. 

What is interesting about this marginalia (beyond the fact that it helps us to identify the sources that were used to compile the accounts in Holinshed and Foxe) is the reason for their inclusion.  As stated above, Holinshed had chosen to show the diversity of opinion in his sources.  The printer who had re-issued Fabian claimed a similar reasoning as to show ‘the diversities’ of Fabian’s sources.  Foxe made similar claims.  One of Patterson’s central arguments in her Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles focuses on the role of censorship in the writing of the chronicles.  In relation to the noting of sources, Patterson recognises that these marginalia might, in part, provide protection from censorship or rebuke as the words are clearly labelled as that of another.  However, Patterson is right to argue also that there was more to it than that. 

John Foxe often added marginalia to prove that he was telling the truth.  It was rare that Foxe would change an account taken from an original document.  What he would do instead is twist the meaning of that account by taking it out of context or ignoring other information contained in the source that was less useful to his argument.  He did this under the belief that the old chroniclers had been corrupted by the antichrist and had therefore written only a partially true account themselves.  Foxe therefore saw himself as doing a service by shifting the truth from the false.  So for Foxe sources were referenced to deepen the truth-claims that he was making.  What he wrote was not his own opinion but that of past writers (Catholic monks at that) who could not entirely suppress the truth. 

In Holinshed and Foxe sources were also noted so that the author could challenge their authenticity or even (in some cases) interact with that source.  Patterson has noted the inclusion of ‘I’ in various passages of Holinshed’s chronicles where the author has argued his opinion against that of the original source (Patterson, p. 36-7).  Indeed, Patterson shows that Foxes’ Acts and Monuments were used as a counter-balance to Holinshed and his successors in the accounts of Edward VI and Mary Tudor.  Holinshed intended for a more neutral stance on religion whilst Foxe obviously focused on his protestant revision of the past.  A comparison of Holinshed and Foxe is therefore interesting as opposing histories of their own period. 

In the Acts and Monuments Foxe used a similar strategy when dealing with Polydore Vergil’s history.  Vergil was viewed by Foxe as the most recent in a line of Popish writers whose goal was to distort the truth and destroy evidence that did not support the Roman Catholic position.  Indeed Foxe and others charged Vergil with the destruction of manuscript sources (a charge that was made somewhat ridiculous as it had been a partially protestant act that had destroyed the monastic libraries and thus hundreds of old manuscripts).  In the Acts and Monuments Foxe often noted Polydore Vergil in the margins in comparison to other older sources to show how distorted history had been written by Vergil.  Any error or uncertainty in Vergil was abused to its fullest in Foxe’s revisions.    

All of this suggests that sources were noted in sixteenth century histories (especially near the end of the century) as a means to defend and strengthen truth-claims, to protect against censorship or claims of heresy and treason.   Although sources were noted to allow others to find their base material this was not the priority and only served the purpose of making it more difficult for opposing historians to attack their truth-claims.  The reason for this evolution in historiographical practice I think must derive in part from increased debate and disagreement between historians over the authenticity of past accounts (made more essential due to the opposing sides of the reformation), the increased availability of accounts made possible from the expansion of the printing press as a medium of distribution, and from humanist as opposed to scholastic methods of looking at texts. 

PhD Thesis: Rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’: John Foxe and the Collaborative Reformation of England’s Past

Front Page from the first edition of the
Acts and Monuments (1563) taken
from The Acts and Monuments Online

My intention today is not so-much to promote my own work, but to state where I am coming from in terms of my own academic background.  The most important element of this is my doctoral thesis which focused on the research and writing by John Foxe and his colleagues to re-appropriate English history in a protestant mould.  John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is the largest evangelical text produced during the sixteenth century reformation in England.  Its main purpose was to promote the reformist agenda at court and to the English population at large. 

Although (from its inception) the Acts and Monuments has been best regarded as a martyrology and memorial for those protestants who were burnt at the stake during the reign of Mary I, it is in actuality an ecclesiastical history which traces the Christian church from its foundations to Foxe’s present day.  It is this element that I studied at the University of Sheffield between 2005 and 2009. 

My thesis focused on Foxe’s attempts to rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’ (his words) held by the English people.  In particular, it looked at Foxe’s writing of medieval history from the arrival of the Anglo Saxons through to the thirteenth century.  I attempted (where possible) to track down Foxes’ sources which were sometimes manuscript or printed copies of medieval chronicles, recent publications such as histories, polemics, catalogues, or treatises, or occasionally based upon official documents searched out in archives.  I also tried to trace Foxes’ contacts: names such as John Bale, Matthew Parker, John Day, Edmund Grindal and many more came up time and again and to varying degrees. 

The context in which Foxe wrote brought my attention to the wider international reformation with connections found between Foxe and the Magdeburg Centuriators of Germany (another gigantic ecclesiastical history project from this period) and various continental scholars.  However, the main basis for my work was the identification of source material that Foxe used and the way that he used it – not to tell lies or falsify as some have claimed in the past, but to tell a specific version of the past based upon what is said in his sources (and what Foxe believed was not said in his sources). 

So that is where I am coming from.  A study of how Foxe and others compiled the medieval portion of the Acts and Monuments.  My studies are now shifting towards a wider investigation of sixteenth century scholars and historians but also towards that moment of transformation which occurred during the reign of Mary I.  Exile not only radicalised many scholars from England in the 1550s but it also set English scholarship on a slightly different path – one that showed itself quite clearly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.