Cornwell: ‘We Are All Living In History’ - Author Addresses Annual Historical Society Meeting

CHATHAM – Although his fiction takes place mostly in England and Europe, best-selling author Bernard Cornwell has spent most of the past 45 years in Chatham.

 “I guess I washed ashore and stayed ashore,” he quipped during a talk at the Chatham Historical Society’s annual meeting at the community center Aug. 14.

 The author of more than 50 books, most historical fiction, Cornwell spoke about the difference between actual historical facts and how history can become embellished over time. The first true historian in the West was the Greek Herodotus who lived in the fifth century BC and has been called the “Father of History.” Many scholars, however, question his work.

 “He was much inclined to make things up,” Cornwell said. Herodotus’ contemporary, Thucydides, was “a lot more accurate” and the tension between the two established a pattern that “still goes on every day in every university in the world,” he said.

 Cornwell tries to strike a balance but comes down on Herodotus’ side. His job in writing historical fiction, he said, is to write “fake history” but to make it as authentic as possible. For instance, he wrote a series of books about King Arthur, but said there is little evidence that Arthur was anything other than a “pure invention.”

 And it’s true that the winners embroider history. He referred to the battle of Agincourt, about which he has also written, which was an “enormous and surprising victory” of the English over the much larger French army. “The English love all battles in which they knock off the French,” he said, but added that Agincourt is usually portrayed by the English as a glorious victory, whereas in fact it was a bloodbath.

 Henry V’s speech at Agincourt is another example of how art shapes history, Cornwell said. In Shakespeare’s play, Henry’s famous St. Crispin’s Day speech rallies the greatly outnumbered English. But that probably never happened. Heralds were on the field on the day of the battle and recorded what Henry said to his troops, which amounted to basically, “Let’s go fellas.” The revisionism was “pure Shakespeare,” he said.

 Cornwell recounted his own foray into revisionism in his novel “The Fort,” about the Penobscot Expedition of 1779 in Maine during the Revolutionary War. Massachusetts (of which Maine was then a part) sent a large force and 42 warships to capture the small British fort, but “it all goes horribly wrong,” Cornwell said. It turns out that the one person most to blame for the loss was an artillery commander named Paul Revere. He was court martialed on charges of incompetence and cowardice, but refused to accept the verdict, and was eventually acquitted. But the grandson of the man who brought the charges against Revere, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ended up lionizing Revere in his poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Revere was made to be a hero, whereas he was only one of several riders on that fateful night, and was actually captured by the British and did not complete his assignment.

 “We deserve to know about Paul Revere,” Cornwell said. “Not the great man Longfellow made him out to be. That was pure Herodotus.”

Today inconvenient events or facts are dubbed “fake news,” noted Cornwell, who worked as a journalist early in his career. But he added that the plethora of media assures that there is “no fake history today.” Fake history is from the dark ages, “when King Arthur wasn’t a king.” 

 “We’re living in history. History is made every day,” he said. “I often think we’re privileged to be alive now. Historians are going to be interested in our times.” He paraphrased Horace Walpole from the early 18th century: “To those who feel the world is a tragedy, to those who think it is a comedy — and I think most of history is a comedy — read it, make it, enjoy it.”

 He concluded, “I am totally Herodotus because I make up history, though we should all want our history to be written by Thucydides.”