Lucy Worsley tells Liz Nicholls the surprising stories behind our monarchy ahead of the publication of her new book Queens and Kings & a talk at Henley Literary Festival.
“History isn’t really about the past at all,” says Lucy Worsley. “It’s a way of investigating and reflecting on who we are today.”
Whether she’s unravelling royal scandals on television, investigating historical mysteries or breathing life into centuries-old stories, Lucy has become one of Britain’s best-loved historians.
And, before the palaces, bestselling books and television documentaries, there was a Berkshire schoolgirl imagining what it might be like to live in the past.
Lucy remembers standing at Reading’s ruined abbey with her brother in what they called “The Lion Park”, imagining the lives that had unfolded among its ruins.
She also attended the Abbey School, where teachers repeatedly reminded pupils of one particularly illustrious former student: Jane Austen. “I didn’t know who Jane Austen was back then,” says Lucy. “But she went on to play an enormous part in my life, as I became her biographer!”
It’s a childhood encounter whose significance only became clear decades later. Lucy’s love of history was flourishing at school, where she remembers lessons as a joy, never a chore. One teacher in particular made an impression.
Ms D’Arcy taught Lucy about the Industrial Revolution while simultaneously being “excitingly and urgently” summoned to the telephone to organise a teachers’ strike. “I believe she has a first name, but she’ll always be Ms D’Arcy to me,” Lucy laughs.
This passion grew into a vocation, although not without a slight detour. Having started out studying science A-levels, Lucy realised she’d made the wrong choice and changed mid-stream… “which caused various upsets. After that, though, I was clear what I wanted to do and went at ‘trying to become a historian’ like an Exocet missile. I know how fortunate I am to have had a vocation. Some people never find out what they want to do!”
More than three decades later, this vocation has taken Lucy from museums and historic buildings to our TV screens and radios, writing several bestselling biographies.
Her latest book, Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History, which is published on 3rd September, draws on more than 20 years as Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, working behind the scenes at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London – even living within one of the palaces herself.
Lucy believes the secret to getting people interested is a story, followed by the willingness to question it.
“I like to use exciting addictive stories to hook people in, and then to take the very same stories apart, to show that narrative is a dangerously seductive and tricksy thing,” she says. “I’m always destroying people’s cherished illusions about the past – I’m very mean like that.”
Queens and Kings takes readers into the private lives of Britain’s monarchs. Familiar figures including Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II appear alongside surprising details and people whose stories are often overlooked. “Women have traditionally been left out of the story.” she says. “All my career I’ve felt an itch to put that right.”
The sources for women’s history may not always be found in traditional collections of state papers, she says, but they are often “hiding in plain sight”. That female-first approach also challenges familiar assumptions. Lucy says readers may be surprised to discover received ideas about Tudor queens – Catherine of Aragon as “the tragic one” and Katherine Howard as “the sexy one” – are incorrect.
Which royal does she think history has misunderstood most? “Extremely unpopular opinion… but I have a soft spot for the drug-addicted, adulterous, ‘useless’ George IV. I think he was just terribly ill-suited to the job of being king.”
Which monarch would she spend a day with? Lucy would travel back to the late 1520s and summon Henry VIII into her office. “I’d suggest he reconsider his life choices,” she says, maybe pointing out that he might regret getting involved with Anne Boleyn.
Of all the palaces, “I admit I have a very soft spot indeed for the enormous Tudor labyrinth of Hampton Court, my office for 21 years.” And it’s the experience of physically being in history-making settings that Lucy hopes brings the past to life for children. Quoting writer Isaac Asimov, she says that when we walk in the footsteps of people such as Anne Boleyn at the Tower of London or Elizabeth I at Hampton Court, “only time, not space, separates us from the people of the past”.
Lucy would choose Mary I for a school assembly on leadership. “She has a bad reputation, because she was a Catholic, and had the bad luck to have her story told by her Protestant enemies,” she says. “But, if you look past that, she was England’s first reigning queen at a time when people didn’t believe women could do the job. Mary had to tear up the rulebook, start again. She made mistakes, so people prefer her younger sister, Elizabeth I. But in some ways, Mary had the harder job, and did it pretty well.”
As for Lucy’s life story, what title would she choose for her own biopic? “I’d call it The Bookworm Shall Go To The Ball. Sometimes all the wonderful things I’ve been given the chance to do seem like a wildly improbable dream.”
Book in for Lucy’s talk on 8th October and many more at henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk
