I watched the first episode of King and Conqueror. It took all my reserves of staying power to make it to the end.
I won’t comment on the quality of the drama. I’m sure plenty
of people will find it sufficiently entertaining to sit through all eight hours.
But as history, it’s absolute nonsense. Not only it is not ‘a true story’ – it is
not even an approximation of a true story. Real characters and events have been
thrown together with zero consideration for historical truth to produce a piece of fiction. To criticize it for being
historically inaccurate would be as pointless as levelling the same accusation at Game of Thrones. From a historian’s point of view it is, to borrow
a phrase from the scientists, not even wrong.
This would be much less irksome if King and Conqueror
wasn’t being sold to the public on the basis of its supposed accuracy. But here’s
James Norton, who plays Harold Godwineson, in a recent promotional interview:
"I remember being constantly surprised reading scripts
and saying 'is this real? This seems completely mad,' and invariably, he [writer Michael Robert Johnson] would be like, 'no, that is exactly what happened.'
Except it isn’t. Not by a long chalk. Not by a country mile. By every conceivable measure, this is
almost exactly what didn’t happen. Of course, the people who produce this kind
of thing will always protest when confronted with this sort of criticism, and
say ‘oh, we had to take one or two liberties – it’s not a lecture, professor!’
But King and Conqueror is all liberties. Apart from the names of the main characters – and some of these have been changed – there’s nothing here that is even vaguely correct. This is a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled from various mangled bits and pieces unearthed from bona fide histories, and stitched together to produce something that anyone remotely familiar with the truth would find unrecognizable.
