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The True History of England, A Three Act Play (British History)
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Mick Harper
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Act One, Scene Thirteen

Mathew Parker:
Well, I’ve scanned it. I'm afraid pressure of work meant I couldn’t read it word for word.

William Camden:
That’s part of the technique. It’s got to be readable but not, shall we say, unputdownable. Digression, repetitive themes, lots of genealogies along with the blood and guts.

Mathew Parker:
Sounds like the Bible.

William Camden:
You’ve got the general idea. Did you believe it?

Mathew Parker:
Let’s not go there.

William Camden:
I meant The History of the Franks.

Mathew Parker:
Yes, quite. Yes, I did quite. In many ways it had the ring of truth. One had to make constant allowances but the overall impression was that nobody would make it up unless you knew somebody had made it up.

William Camden:
That’s the nub. How did you know somebody had made it up?

Mathew Parker:
I see what you mean. If you hadn’t told me...

William Camden:
Let’s say you were taught it in the classroom.

Mathew Parker:
Well, yes, we always believe what we’re taught as impressionable minds. But how are you to persuade schoolmasters to teach it? They have to follow the curriculum but they wouldn’t teach stuff they knew to be made up. Would they?

William Camden:
But they do teach stuff that was taught to them at university when they were impressionable minds.

Mathew Parker:
True, but that just shifts the problem up a level.

William Camden:
And what do university lecturers teach? What they were taught as undergraduates when they were impressionable minds.

Mathew Parker:
I don’t mean be obstructive, but that just shifts the problem back a bit.

William Camden:
To us.

Mathew Parker:
What does that mean? Who’s us?

William Camden:
The Society of Antiquaries. Or whatever the French equivalent is. Didn’t you know, they’ve just found The History of the Franks in some mouldering manuscript in the bowels of somewhere or other? It’s quite transformed their understanding of French history.
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Act One, Scene Fourteen

William Camden:
I see a problem straightaway.

Robert Cotton:
The language problem?

William Camden:
Exactly. The French don’t speak Frankish.

Robert Cotton:
On the other hand nobody seems that bothered.

William Camden:
Even so the situation will have to be addressed.

Robert Cotton:
For sure. My first inclination was to have a sort of pre-history of the English.

William Camden:
Sounds clumsy. How would that work?

Robert Cotton:
The Romans leave, leaving behind Christianity, but everything else goes to the dogs.

William Camden:
You mean like the Wars of the Roses and the Tudors ride to the rescue?

Robert Cotton:
I suppose that might be implied, but anyway the Anglo-Saxons ride to the rescue.

William Camden:
Hardly ride but I don’t see how that helps. They won't be bringing Christianity, will they?

Robert Cotton:
No, but law and order is a good second. In fact them being out-and-out pagans is good for us because we can avoid all that business of the Franks being Arian and then going Catholic with hardly a whimper. That’s not what we're looking for at all.

William Camden:
I can see a technical problem though. If everything’s going to the dogs there’s not likely to be people sitting around writing histories about how the country’s going to the dogs, are there?

Robert Cotton:
Let’s face it, there’s not likely to be histories of any sort but The History of the Franks seems to have been accepted easily enough. People always prefer something to nothing.

William Camden:
Anything rather than nothing.

Robert Cotton:
And in any case we can turn the whole situation to our advantage because, as you say, it won’t be, it can’t be, an actual history, just a general Jeremiad about how awful going to the dogs is. Job on a national scale. It writes itself.

William Camden:
Thus setting the scene for the History of the English. Have them put something together and we'll review the situation from there.
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Act One, Scene Fifteen

Mathew Parker:
Did the Secretary wish to approve Gildas?

William Cecil:
It’s laying it on a bit thick but I suppose that’s the general idea. What’s next?

Mathew Parker:
There are two schools of thought. The first is to introduce more or less complete sets of annals laying it all out; the second is to have historians going around, Herodotus style, interviewing the main characters, reporting current traditions and so forth, presenting it all as living history.

William Cecil:
Don’t we pay you to make these kinds of decisions?

Mathew Parker:
It involves matters of state.

William Cecil:
Go on.

Mathew Parker:
The advantage of annals is that they can be deemed to have been written at any time since they are of their nature copies of copies but if they report matters too obviously convenient for ... later times ... they will lack credibility. Being, as it were, copies.

William Cecil:
So go with historians.

Mathew Parker:
Yes, but the problem there is that since we must have the Irish arriving from the north before Augustine arrives from the south, the historians will have to be Irish or at any rate Northumbrian. At least to start with. This is bound to cut across current national policy in a number of ways.

William Cecil:
Sounds more like the Canterbury interest than the national interest.

Mathew Parker:
I can assure the Secretary...

William Cecil:
If this Gildas character is good enough for a couple of hundred years, I’m sure we can have just a single historian taking it on for another hundred or so. Then switch over to annals. I presume they will be nice and southern.

Mathew Parker:
There will be several versions.

William Cecil:
Don’t milk it. This isn't jobs for the boys.
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Act One, Scene Sixteen

Elizabeth:
How is our new history coming along, Master Secretary?

William Cecil:
Slowly, but we have had an extraordinary stroke of luck.

Robert Dudley:
It turned out to be true?

William Cecil:
It turned out not to exist.

Elizabeth:
An unsettling thought, Secretary.

William Cecil:
Yes. As one of my people put it, ‘People prefer something to nothing.’ Later amended to ‘Anything rather than nothing.’ It's become something of a watchword with them.

Elizabeth:
You spoke of luck.

William Cecil:
Printing, your majesty. We are the first people in history to record history via printed documents and not hand-written ones. It is a question of what survives best.

Robert Dudley:
Pff. I am something of a bibliophile myself. I’m sure we all are. Manuscripts have a longevity every bit as long as printed books. In fact longer since parchment is much more durable than paper.

William Cecil:
That is true but it is a question of volume.

Elizabeth:
Would you mind being a little less opaque, Secretary, for the benefit of those of us without your quickness of mind?

William Cecil:
How do we know the Magna Carta exists? Because we have, according to the Archbishop, eight extant copies of it. I say ‘copies’ but each one has minute variations because of course they were all copied by hand. Then carefully distributed. And then carefully preserved.

Robert Dudley:
I thought you were giving us a lecture in disappearing history.

William Cecil:
Well, the Magna Carta is I suppose the most important document in our history. But, according to the Archbishop, is pretty much the only document in our history that can be absolutely relied on. Because it was designed and distributed to achieve just that. Even so, we could round up those copies, destroy them and put anything we like in their place.

Elizabeth:
So we could if it had been printed.

William Cecil:
No, ma’am, we could not. Every schoolboy in England has a book that refers to it, that quotes from it, that paraphrases it, that reproduces it in its entirety in an appendix if need be. We cannot round up all the schoolboys of England. We are stuck with the Magna Carta. But very little else.
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Act One, Scene Seventeen

William Camden:
Is this degree of detail really necessary? This Bede seems to get everywhere, talks to everyone, knows everything. It’s better than our stuff.

Robert Cotton:
You said to use Herodotus as our model.

William Camden:
I suppose. And what’s all this about the Anglo-Saxons having a law code in Anglo-Saxon in the seventh century? We don’t even have a law code, never mind in English.

Robert Cotton:
Yes, that’s awkward. But necessary. You see, the general picture post-Gildas is of a country in disarray but clinging on to the vestiges of Christianity when these Irish missionaries show up, reforming zeal, new broom, start turning things round etc etc.

William Camden:
Careful.

Robert Cotton:
Just so. They all shove off to the Continent, blah blah, leaving this new Church in the hands of English converts.

William Camden:
This chap Cuthbert.

Robert Cotton:
Well, Durham has an entire pilgrimage industry devoted to him, had a pilgrimage industry, he’s still practically God up there, so we decided if you can’t leave him out, better weave him in.

William Camden:
Yes, we wouldn’t want another Pilgrimage of Grace. But what’s this got to do with law codes written in their own language (how did that happen?) by people who seem to have just got off the boat and are spending all day everyday coming to terms with governing an entire country in perpetual uproar?

Robert Cotton:
The Anglo-Saxons are obsessed with them. We’ve got several law codes on the stocks. Ready to be fed in.

William Camden:
But why?

Robert Cotton:
They’re precursors to the Normans. In fact in many ways they are Normans, only ahead of their time. If you want to paint a picture of orderly calm, a settled religion but everything's not so wonderful that they aren't going to be swept away by the Normans without much fuss, there's no better way than a law code.

William Camden:
Yes, I can see the advantages of that. But why in Anglo-Saxon? The Normans didn’t issue laws in Norman French, did they? They used Latin, same as everybody else.

Robert Cotton:
Yes, but they existed, didn’t they? The Norman laws, I mean. Norman everything. There’s going to be references to them everywhere. Not just in France, all the way to Rome. We can’t possibly control that. But nobody’s going to have anything written in Anglo-Saxon, are they?

William Camden:
Except us.
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Act One, Scene Eighteen

Robert Cecil:
How are you handling Parliament?

William Camden:
I didn’t know we were supposed to be
.
Robert Cecil:
She’s rather got the bit between her teeth and is demanding all sorts of precedents be set.

William Camden:
Does she want it puffed up or cast down, broadly speaking?

Robert Cecil:
You don't think the Queen goes into that kind of detail, do you?

William Camden:
It makes our work rather difficult not knowing.

Robert Cecil:
Welcome to government. What are the options, broadly speaking?

William Camden:
Not very broad. We can have the Anglo-Saxons setting something up, if she wants us to be first in the field, though obviously Parliament is too French so it would not be under that name. No name, no footprint. It really would be of limited use. Everything gets swept away by the Normans anyway. We don’t have much leeway in that regard, I'm afraid, it's critical to everything.

Robert Cecil:
And later?

William Camden:
The problem you’ll have there is that every Parliamentarian is his own antiquarian. Peers have their genealogies going back as far as ... well, as far as the Conquest, whether they do or they don’t. Gentry families are, if anything, even worse.

Robert Cecil:
I think you mean better.

William Camden:
In any case, both Houses have their own peculiar ideas about precedents, tell the Queen. They rather pride themselves that nothing is written down so it can hardly be re-written down.

Robert Cecil:
Very well, we’ll have to make special provision. Do the Anglo-Saxon bit but otherwise skirt round.
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Act One, Scene Nineteen

Francis Walsingham:
What you don’t seem to understand is that conspiracies tend to get found out when three or more are involved. Two is usually one too many.

William Camden:
Yes, but surely when it’s, as it were, a legal conspiracy...

Francis Walsingham:
That’s as may be but numbers must be kept down all the same. Why all this necessity for so many copiers for instance?

William Camden:
Because one copy doesn’t ring true.

Francis Walsingham:
You’ve lost me.

William Camden:
Well, it only applies to key texts but let’s take Bede. Now if we do what the French have done and find a single copy and trumpet it around, then the opposition is going to really go to town.

Francis Walsngham:
But you’ve been telling us that this History of the Franks has been accepted nem con. I thought that was the whole starting point.

William Camden:
Because there’s no opposition. Who cares if the French want to prance around as the oldest monarchy in Europe?

Francis Walsingham:
Somebody must have, to have gone to the trouble.

William Camden:
Well, yes, at the time it was important. Something to do with who got called His Most Christian Majesty while the Spanish had to make do with His Most Catholic Majesty.

Francis Walsingham:
Weren’t we in with a shout?

William Camden:
We were when Henry was Defender of the Faith but well ... that’s gone by the board now.

Francis Walsingham:
The extra copies...

William Camden:
Yes. The point is we are launching a bit of a religious revolution so we can expect scrutiny from all sides. A single Bede is going to rather stick out.

Francis Walsingham:
I should think suddenly finding six Bedes is going to stick out even more.

William Camden:
Who said anything about ‘sudden’? Why don’t you leave that side of things to me?
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Act One, Scene Twenty

Robert Cotton:
This Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is presenting us with all sorts of difficulties.

William Camden:
I like a man who brings me solutions rather than problems.

Robert Cotton:
A problem shared is a problem solved. It’s the nature of annals themselves.

William Camden:
I thought we chose it because of its simplicity.

Robert Cotton:
Yes, but we hadn’t realised at the time that creating them de novo is not the same as keeping them up to date.

William Camden:
Were they kept up to date?

Robert Cotton:
That’s sort of the problem. The first problem. An annal is meant to be added to year by year. That means a different hand, year by year. Or at any rate a different hand, say, decade by decade.

William Camden:
You need more hands?

Robert Cotton:
Oh, we solved that by making it a copy. Several copies, if you see what I mean. But consider the copyist. Is he making a contribution to history or is he making a contribution to politics?

William Camden:
Yes, I see what you mean. History is not paying him, his paymaster is. But surely that will only apply to the most recent entries?

Robert Cotton:
Actually not. If it’s your own monastery paying you that will probably mean a land grant years, even centuries, before. And that entry, those entries, must be contemporary with the event.

William Camden:
So? Surely they would be?

Robert Cotton:
Well, yes and no. We’ve looked at most of them, we’ve quietly inspected everybody’s annals everywhere – Ireland's got the most but every country seems to have at least one, people are quite proud of them – and they’re all copies. We know that because the handwriting doesn't change very much. Certainly not decade by decade.

William Camden:
So, strictly speaking, they’re not contemporaneous records. Just copies of contemporaneous records. Is that all you’re saying?

Robert Cotton:
Not quite. No.
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Act One, Scene Twenty-One

Robert Cotton:
It starts in 1 AD, so I doubt that was contemporaneous.

John Day:
Actually we’ve put an entry for 60 BC in to cover Caesar’s visit to Britain. “Rome was unable to gain any empire there”. Nice touch, we thought. Sets the stage.

Robert Cotton:
That hasn’t been finally agreed. It starts proper in 1 AD.

William Camden:
Yes, but that’s all pro forma. Everyone does that.

John Day:
We were going to go back to Brutus. Emphasise the Trojan angle, that would put us on a par with Rome. But we got overruled.

William Camden:
Yes, all right, but when does the contemporaneous stuff start?

John Day:
495 is the first substantial entry. Cerdic and Cynric. That’s necessary to establish Wessex later.

William Camden:
We’re going with Wessex?

Robert Cotton:
Least worst option. Winchester insisted, Parker’s agreed.

William Camden:
Spare me the details. The point is nobody’s claiming a monk started the Chronicle in 495, are they?

John Day:
No, it doesn’t work like that.

William Camden:
Jesu Christ, is someone going to tell me how it does work?

Robert Cotton:
It’s left deliberately vague. The assumption is that whoever it was, whenever it was, they had access to Gildas and Bede and whatever else was around and just sort of took up the story. It never actually says.

William Camden:
Aren’t people going to think that’s a bit weird? If I was beginning a brand new history of England, I think I might mention the fact.

Robert Cotton:
It can’t be helped. Too many hostages to fortune otherwise.

William Camden:
All right, I'll take your word for it. Go on.
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Act One, Scene Twenty-Two

Robert Cotton:
It’s really a question of what you might call ‘continuity of supply’.

William Camden:
What’s that when it’s at home? I wish you people would speak plain.

Robert Cotton:
Well, look, if I put into your hands a document that says England formally agreed to, as it were, join up with Rome, as opposed to being proselytised by Rome, you’re going to ask some pretty hard questions.

William Camden:
Such as?

Robert Cotton:
When it happened for a start.

William Camden:
Yes, and it will say when it happened. When is it supposed to have happened?

Robert Cotton:
John?

John Day:
Synod of Whitby, 664.

William Camden:
There you go then.

Robert Cotton:
That’s the easy bit. Anyone can write an annal that says such and such happened in 664 AD. How on earth do you persuade anybody else that anyone did write it e.g. John's people the other week.

William Camden:
You age the document. What is this, dame school?

Robert Cotton:
Have you ever seen a nine hundred year old document?

William Camden:
Well, no, obviously it’s a copy.

Robert Cotton:
Have you ever seen a one hundred year old document?

William Camden:
Yes, the Magna Carta. Not that I’ve actually seen it.

Robert Cotton:
And parliamentary bills and Exchequer rolls and all sorts of stuff – we’ve been rather surprised actually – but what about things that aren’t specially preserved. Like a seventh century parchment that has to be taken out at least once a year to be updated and then stashed back in the library of a monastery that didn’t itself survive into the next century?

William Camden:
So one of them survived. And got copied.

John Day:
Six of them survived actually. And got copied in different monasteries. It’s a holy miracle.

Robert Cotton:
Yes, but the bit we still haven’t cracked is why on earth anyone would copy somebody else’s annal. And kept on copying them until we rounded them up last year.

John Day:
Actually, Bob, we have sort of cracked that.
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Act One, Scene Twenty-Three

John Day:
The mistake the French made with the History of the Franks was to have one document, and that commits them to a single channel of transmission.

William Camden:
Seems to have worked well enough.

John Day:
True, but their aims were much less limited. They just want to show how old France is, how venerable the French monarchy is, how devotedly Catholic they’ve always been, so they can make a virtue out of some hypothetical central scriptorium keeping everything up to date, year by year, and copying the sacred text scrupulously as each actual vellum document falls to bits thanks to the ravages of time.

William Camden:
And we can’t?

John Day:
We’re trying to make a virtue out of discontinuity. It’s hardly likely that a Norman scriptorium, making a new copy, is going to bother about laboriously retailing a bunch of carrying-ons concerning five hundred year old Mercian princesses, are they?

William Camden:
I thought that was the whole point of annals.

John Day:
What? To provide us five hundred years in the future with a complete history of England? Normans hardly recognised there was an England. Annals are written for political purposes, nobody pays for history.

Robert Cotton:
If they’re written at all.

John Day:
We agreed not to go down that road.

William Camden:
You still haven't said what method you have come up with.

John Day:
Well, it’s obvious enough really. Which institution, institutions, claim to have been around all the time, from that day to this, through every change of government, and have a track record of making and keeping documents?

William Camden:
The monastic orders.
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Act One, Scene Twenty-Four

John Day:
Quite so, they have proved invaluable.

Robert Cotton:
When was this decision taken?

John Day:
It evolved quite naturally as we leafed through their records. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we found.

Robert Cotton:
I don’t doubt it but there was a good reason not to rely on them. We may have got their records in England but unfortunately the Orders have records in a dozen countries over which we have no control whatsoever.

John Day:
Yes, but it turns out every monastery is pretty much responsible for its own upkeep. It wouldn’t, as a matter of course, send in duplicates to head office. As a matter of fact, a lot of the stuff is so bogus Head Office would rather not know.

William Camden:
This is all well known. You can read all about it in Cromwell’s Commissioners’ Reports.

John Day:
They don't mention the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles though, do they?

William Camden:
Obviously not.

John Day:
Well, they must have had a copy at some time.

Robert Cotton:
This is cloud cuckoo land.

William Camden:
I’m inclined to agree.

John Day:
Well, it’s quite simple. When did the Orders set up their monasteries in England? I mean, for real.

William Camden:
Eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth century ... a bit of a dribble after that.

Robert Cotton:
Mostly closures after that.

John Day:
Lots of closures before that. It was a very competitive environment. They were all engaged in constant lawsuits over title to land, what privileges they had been granted, by whom, who had pilgrimage rights to what saint ... you name it, they fought over it.

William Camden:
As I say, it’s all in the Reports. It’s all in lawcourt rolls come to that. Even Domesday Book, I would have thought.

John Day:
Quite. Everything’s based on precedent and tradition. As far back, the better. Whether real or claimed. They all had a need for a History of England, even if they didn’t know it at the time.

Robert Cotton:
Yes, I begin to see. A History of England but a Benedictine version and a Carthusian version and a Cluniac version.

John Day:
Not a version, no, who would believe that? One version, faithfully kept up to date, but with ... you know ... unavoidable copying variations. The occasional interpolation. So-and-so did whatever it was. In perpetuity. Always in perpetuity despite being taken over later by whoever it was. Such a need for constant copying with these old manuscripts.

Robert Cotton:
No wonder we have so many copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, and so many variant copies.

William Camden:
We have now.
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Act One, Scene Twenty-Five

John Day:
I have divided it into centuries so each team can be getting on with a separate chunk. We can attend to continuity problems afterwards.

Team Leader One:
When’s the cut-off point?

John Day:
We thought the 1120’s since it will take a whole generation for Anglo-Saxon scribes to cease working. But each version will stop at different points as the various scriptoria give up the ghost under the Norman lash.

Team Leader Two:
Some of us have been wondering about these scriptoria. The overall project requires them to be operating all the way back to ... what is it? ... six, seven hundred AD not just on a reasonably continuous basis but communicating with one another sufficiently to ensure the overall fidelity of the Chronicle itself. Surely someone’s going to ask, 'Where are they now?'

John Day:
This is the Dark Ages, surely they can’t be expected to last all that long.

Team Leader Two:
And yet manage to produce continuous chronicles?

John Day:
Fair point. Any suggestions?

Team Leader One:
Internal evidence in the Chronicles themselves?

Team Leader Two:
What, have a bloodstained hand making one last entry...

Team Leader One:
Don’t be an arse. One monastery keeping up the Chronicle records the sorry demise of another monastery that was etc etc

Team Leader Three:
We could use the Danes. After all they’re fighting the Anglo-Saxons so they’re bound to destroy their scriptoria but the Anglo-Saxons retreat with all their most precious records etc etc. It could be quite exciting.

John Day:
This is not for popular consumption. Besides the Danes are allies, they might not take kindly to being badmouthed as historical villains.

Team Leader One:
Not to mention having records of their own.

Team Leader Three:
Swedes?

John Day:
Ditto

Team Leader Three:
Norwegians. You're not telling me they're going to have records.

John Day:
Look, I’ll get some guidance from upstairs and we can revisit this.
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Act One, Scene Twenty-Six

William Camden:
How doctrinal do you want us to go?

Mathew Parker:
Cautiously. We can’t be completely sure how far we’re going to go.

William Camden:
Married priests?

Mathew Parker:
Not if we’re using monks to spread the gospel, I wouldn’t have thought.

William Camden:
Transubstantiation?

Mathew Parker:
Would that have been a live issue in the Dark Ages?

William Camden:
Could be if you want it to be.

Mathew Parker:
It would be useful, yes, but treat it allusively. It’s the relationship with Rome that’s the main thing. What’s the current scenario?

William Camden:
We’ve had a bit of a breakthrough there as a matter of fact. Our original idea is that there’s a native English ... well, I suppose, that would be a British ... Church that has fallen on hard times.

Mathew Parker:
Yes, I’ve read your Gildas. Excellent, I thought. First class. We all thought so. You can pass the word among your chaps.

William Camden:
Chap, actually. Anyway this native Church gets renewed – we’re not using 'reform' for obvious reasons – by these Irish monks but obviously it’s all very monastic which has to come to a fairly prompt end.

Mathew Parker:
You’re avoiding the word 'dissolution' too?

William Camden:
Oh no, the monasteries stay, they’re far too useful, it’s just the church governance that has to change.

Mathew Parker:
The Irish accept that? Not very believable.

William Camden:
That’s the breakthrough. We have a Renaissance. There’s parts for everyone.
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Act One, Scene Twenty-Seven

William Cecil:
The English, it turns out, were rather important in bringing Christianity to Europe. Rather more important than Rome in many respects.

Elizabeth:
One is cautiously pleased.

Robert Dudley:
One is cautiously sceptical.

William Cecil:
I think it’s going to work. They’ve exploited a loophole. The History of the Franks finishes very early so there are several centuries that are pretty much virgin territory.

Elizabeth:
Secretary!

William Cecil:
What I mean is that while the Catholic countries are pretty much spoken for and a lot of others have already got Irish missionaries converting them, there is a whole swathe that ... how to put it? ... lacks a history.

Robert Dudley:
And we turn up to provide it.

William Cecil:
If you like, yes. We’ve got the Synod of Whitby producing our Roman Church, that can’t be avoided, but it’s got hybrid vigour. We have to exploit the fact that we’re the only place where there’s an actual mating of two churches, so these newly evangelised Anglo-Saxons go off to evangelise everyone else.

Robert Dudley:
They go back whence they came. How nice for them.

William Cecil:
And for good measure they turn up at Charlemagne's court and start telling the French how do it.

Elizabeth:
I like that.

Robert Dudley:
The French won't. And surely they'll have the records to prove it.

William Cecil:
No, they don't. That's the whole point. Nobody's got anything very much beyond these monastic claims that they were founded by peripatetic Irish monks in order to free themselves from Rome.

Robert Dudley:
I would have thought the French, above all, would spot the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a confection.

Elizabeth:
Robert, what is the French for calling a pot black?
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