Liz: Hello, Delia! Shall we chat a bit about this episode? I think one question it raises is: what is part of the historic record, and what is made up, and what is the tension and balance between those? It’s definitely something we had to negotiate constantly. In this episode, we bring in some new characters to mix it up with Catherine, Barbara, and Charles. Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, at this point called James Crofts, was of course a real person. Lord Russell was as well, though as a much more minor figure less detail is known of him, and we were free to invent his character, inspired by what history tells us of his actions. Lady Eleanor Plumstead is entirely fictional—no Lord Plumstead is on the list of executed regicides.Delia: I love our fictional characters! There are so many people history has forgotten, either because they never did anything History thinks worth noting (or because they failed) or because they were not-particularly-beautiful women or servants (or both). We’re just filling in the blanks by telling their stories, in exactly the same way that novels set in the present fill in the blanks of current events by telling the stories of the nameless maids, waiters, plumbers, IT techs, and office workers who witness and are affected by them. After all, the historical record is, for the most part, about the public actions and words of a few important and powerful men and women. A novel with only them in it would be really limited.Liz: Yes! Absolutely. It’s a great pleasure to imaginatively recreate the past to include stories of the overlooked; even if we have to make them up, we ground them in the possible. Our Jenny, a servant of half Spanish heritage. The tailor’s apprentice Thom, a London-born Turkish Muslim. And now Eleanor, whose family—while noble—belonged to the losing side of the Civil War and a now (again) minority religion, the Puritans. (It says something of Charles’s well-known religious tolerance that such a lady would be allowed at court. He was no Bloody Mary.) Speaking of taking liberties with the historical record: you have to, but it’s a tricky thing, isn’t it? We read historical fiction at least in part to feel we’re time traveling—to feel we’re experiencing a little of what it would have been like to be then. So we want to trust that we’re reading something with some accuracy. But story telling requires some leeway. For example, Charles’s mother, Queen Consort Henrietta Maria, came over from France after the Restoration and set herself up in London (until apparently deciding the English climate was unhealthy for her, and going back in 1665). But we didn’t see room for her in our story—we didn’t need her—so we left her in France. Looking back, this seems a small and acceptable diversion from the strict record and no big deal, but I remember we worried over it very much.Delia: Some of that decision had to do with drama. Texts like Pepys’ Diary and court memoirs indicate that it was Henrietta Maria who engineered the truce between Catherine and Barbara, inviting them to meet at her house (and nobody, but nobody, tells Henrietta Maria that she’s washing her hair and can’t come) and forcing them to be civil to each other. It would have been a great scene, and lots of fun to write, but it would have pulled the focus, the drama, and the agency from Barbara and Catherine. Given the force of Henrietta Maria’s personality, we feared that she would take over the serial, and we didn’t want that to happen.But she’s not the only character we left out, not by a long shot. Sir Edward Fanshawe, the English Ambassador to Portugal, hit the cutting room floor, along with Catherine’s second duenna and her six Portuguese priests and their attendants. We’ve done our best to indicate that royal personages were pretty much surrounded by people 24/7, with very little privacy even in their most private moments. But a little of that goes a long way in a fictional narrative. Liz: Indeed. Sometimes we have to content ourselves with sketching the background, to leave room for the actual story in the foreground. We even had to hold back with some of the characters we do have—some of them could easily have a story all to themselves. Rochester, for example. We do have a good deal of him, but as a supporting player, where he’s been the hero of many a story (the movie The Libertine, for example, and, under a fictional name, Aphra Behn’s The Rover). We also took the liberty—after much discussion and consideration—of aging him up a couple of years. In 1662 the historical Rochester was still a teenager on a grand tour of Europe (albeit not a teenager in the modern sense—he’d already left university and was independent, drinking, dueling, and debauching with the best of them. . . well, perhaps that is a teenager in the modern sense). He didn’t join the Restoration court until ’64. But we needed him, we wanted him, and so we simply moved him up a couple of years. We would not have done that with Catherine, or Charles, or even Barbara, though. The heart of the story is as firmly rooted as we could manage. Delia: I guess the bottom line is that we tried to give as honest a take on the splendors, excesses, concerns, and dramas of the Restoration court as we could manage. It’s our take, of course, and no matter how much research we did, we couldn’t accurately reproduce every detail of 17th Century society and cultural attitudes—nor would modern readers find it very appealing if we did. At best, we’ve made a passably accurate 21st Century translation of Charles’s court and its personages. And, I might add, had a really good time doing it.
