Things were simpler in Wolf Hall times (everything comes back to WH at the moment, I’m finding). The people bowed and kowtowed to the king, who was all-powerful. If a law got in his way, he had it changed. If a person got in his way, he had them taken to the Tower and their head removed. He married often, to whomever he damn pleased. And when he was done with a wife, she was discarded, disposed of – divorced, beheaded etc.
Nearly 500 years on, it has been a little different for the man who may or may not one day become King Charles III. The Queen comes into Steve Hewlett’s Reinventing the Royals (BBC2) a bit, but it’s really about what and who comes next, and their relationship with the country and – in particular – the media. Charles may think it’s the 16th century – I’m sure he’d like it to be – but it just isn’t. He was allowed to divorce his first wife, but not to send her to the Tower. Her death, although conspiracists may disagree, was a terrible accident.
That tragedy in a Paris underpass in 1997 is where Hewlett’s story begins. A turning point and a nadir, relations between monarchy and media lie twisted and broken, and there’s very little sympathy for either from the people, who blame both for the death of Their Princess. The press, outraged at the prospect of having to behave better, take it out on themselves and throw mud and buns and everything else at each other, although in the end their rules of engagement have to be rewritten.
And Charles has a problem. Loathed by the public, and still wounded after defeat in the great media battle with his first wife, he needs to win a new one (battle) to bring the press – and the people – round to the idea of a second (wife). It’s something he can’t do alone, so he hires someone to rebuild his image.
It’s not going to be easy, his new man, Mark Bolland, tells him. “Do I keep you for what’s easy?” Charles hisses. (How do I know this? I am reliably informed by a very close source, whose identity I cannot reveal, naturally.) “Do you think I’ve promoted you for the charm of your presence?” the prince continues to the commoner. “I keep you because you’re a serpent …”
Hang on, that is Wolf Hall, I’m getting muddled. But maybe, if William and Harry had got their history from actual history (yeah, buck up, Eton), rather than from 1980s TV comedy, they would have called their father’s new press secretary not Blackadder, but Thomas Cromwell.
Perhaps it’s not so different after all, now and 500 years ago. Beleaguered king (or king-in-waiting), hated by many, wants to marry again, and hires an unlikely outsider, a machiavellian manipulator, to ease the process. It works, too. Bolland – and Cromwell – are largely successful in their shadowy work, although both then end up falling out with their employers. More spectacularly in the case of the earlier man, but then if Mark Bolland had been around five centuries ago his head would probably have ended up on a spike on London Bridge, too.
Instead he ended up in today’s equivalent: PR. And he started to write columns for newspapers. I know! Whose side is he on, anyway? Traitor! To the Tow … Oh, no, wrong century. But that doesn’t mean there’s not an awful lot of fun about the place. Royalty and plebs at war; overpopulated marriages; affairs; treachery; a baying, hungry pack; scoundrels and villains, Alastair Campbell, Piers Morgan, cardinal Blair; heretical biographies, unauthorised, although not necessarily disapproved of; sources everywhere, right on the inside of inside (mine was the Queen herself; I know you’re not supposed to reveal them, but she won’t mind – sang like a canary, she did).
It used to be the press’s game – they photographed (from speeding cars and the top of step ladders) and said whatever they liked. But the royals learned how to play, too. To the point where you now shouldn’t really believe anything or anyone; it’s all about agenda and spin and management. Still like Wolf Hall. Absolutely fabulously irresistible, though. And it will one day make a splendid costume drama. Tim Pigott-Smith has already captured Charles III on stage; the part is his. And Mark Rylance as Bolland? Why not?
