History begins with evidence.
Historical fiction begins with imagination.
At first glance, that should make the distinction between them simple. One tells us what happened; the other invents stories about what happened.
But anyone who has fallen into the worlds of Hilary Mantel, C. J. Sansom or Ken Follett — or watched a series such as The Tudors — knows that the boundary is considerably more complicated.
Historical fiction can distort history. It can compress decades into months, move people into places where they never stood, invent conversations that were never recorded, manufacture romances, simplify politics and occasionally turn people who actually lived into characters their contemporaries might barely recognise.
Yet historical fiction can also accomplish something conventional history often struggles to do.
It can put people back into history.
It can remind us that the Reformation was not merely a theological dispute between monarchs, popes and reformers. It meant monasteries closing, communities changing, familiar religious rituals disappearing and ordinary people wondering whether beliefs they had been taught since childhood had suddenly become crimes.
It can transform an eighteenth-century food riot from a paragraph about grain prices into a hungry mother watching sacks of wheat leave her town.
It can make us smell the streets, hear the church bells, feel the cold inside an unheated house and understand why an apparently insignificant change in the law might terrify one person and liberate another.
Historical fiction therefore presents us with a paradox:
Something that never happened can sometimes help us understand something that did.
The difficulty is knowing where history ends and imagination begins.
History Is Not the Past
There is an important distinction between the past and history.
The past consists of everything that actually happened.
History is our attempt to reconstruct it.
Most of the past has disappeared.
Conversations vanished the moment they ended. Private thoughts were rarely recorded. The lives of millions of ordinary people passed without leaving diaries, portraits or bundles of correspondence.
Even famous historical figures survive imperfectly.
We possess letters, diplomatic reports, legal documents, financial accounts, chronicles and testimony, but each comes with problems. Writers had prejudices. Ambassadors repeated gossip. Governments produced propaganda. Witnesses lied. Chroniclers wrote years later. Victors preserved their version of events while defeated factions sometimes disappeared almost completely from the record.
Then historians arrive centuries later and attempt to reconstruct what happened.
They too interpret.
New evidence appears. Old evidence is reconsidered. Assumptions change.
This is why Anne Boleyn has experienced so many historical reincarnations.
She has been portrayed as Protestant heroine, ambitious temptress, calculating political operator, sexual predator, innocent victim, feminist icon and doomed romantic heroine.
The woman herself has been dead since 1536.
The interpretations continue.
The Empty Room
Historical fiction encounters a problem the historian can sometimes avoid.
Imagine Thomas Cromwell interrogating someone suspected of involvement with Anne Boleyn.
The historian might write:
What occurred during the interrogation cannot be established with certainty.
Perfectly legitimate.
Now imagine filming that scene.
Two actors enter a room.
The door closes.
Something must happen.
The screenwriter cannot put a caption on screen saying:
Unfortunately the surviving evidence becomes rather unreliable at this point.
Someone must speak.
Someone must react.
The writer therefore enters what we might call the empty room of history.
Evidence brought us to the door.
Imagination takes us inside.
That is simultaneously the great strength and great danger of historical fiction.
Poor Mark Smeaton
Few people demonstrate this problem better than Mark Smeaton.
Smeaton was a musician at Henry VIII’s court and became one of the men accused of committing adultery with Anne Boleyn.
He was also the only accused man who confessed.
That immediately presents historians with an enormous problem.
Why?
The circumstances of his questioning remain uncertain. Contemporary or near-contemporary reports suggest harsh treatment, but the more elaborate stories of torture cannot simply be accepted as documented fact.
Nevertheless, something extraordinary occurred.
Smeaton confessed to a capital offence involving the queen.
The other accused men — Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton and Anne’s brother George Boleyn — denied the accusations.
Smeaton did not.
Was he tortured?
Threatened?
Psychologically broken?
Promised mercy?
Did interrogators manipulate a frightened young man of considerably lower social standing than the aristocratic figures surrounding him?
Or did he actually confess voluntarily?
The historian must live with uncertainty.
Historical fiction cannot resist filling the silence.
And here class becomes crucial.
Smeaton was not merely another name on Cromwell’s list. His social position was different from that of the gentlemen around Anne.
A Tudor audience understood those distinctions instinctively.
Modern audiences often do not.
A television drama that makes us frightened for Smeaton may therefore communicate an important historical reality even if the particular interrogation it depicts is invented:
Tudor justice did not fall equally upon everyone.
Rank mattered.
Connections mattered.
Access mattered.
And once the Crown decided someone was expendable, survival could depend upon possessing powerful friends.
Smeaton had remarkably few.
Anne Boleyn: The Woman Beneath Five Centuries of Storytelling
Anne presents an even greater problem.
We know an enormous amount about her compared with most sixteenth-century women.
Yet some of the things we most desperately want to know remain inaccessible.
Did she genuinely love Henry?
How deeply committed was she to religious reform?
How much political influence did she exercise independently?
What precisely happened between Anne and the men later accused of being her lovers?
Did Henry eventually believe the allegations?
Did Cromwell manufacture the case?
Was Henry complicit from the beginning?
Or did political manoeuvring, marital failure and royal paranoia combine into something even more complicated?
Historians continue arguing.
That is precisely why modern historical documentaries can still produce programmes promising to search for the “real” Anne Boleyn five centuries after her execution. Even something apparently elementary — exactly what Anne looked like — remains surprisingly uncertain. Recent History Hit work has examined surviving portraits and the problems involved in identifying an authentic likeness.
The historical Anne is therefore surrounded by successive fictional Annes.
Every generation creates another.
The Tudors
: History as Grand Opera
Michael Hirst’s The Tudors makes little attempt to disguise its dramatic ambitions.
Its Henry VIII is young, sexually magnetic, volatile and dangerous. Jonathan Rhys Meyers bears little resemblance to the enormous later Henry familiar from Holbein’s portraits.
Chronology is compressed.
Characters are combined.
Events move.
Conversations are invented.
Historical people occasionally find themselves doing things for which evidence ranges from questionable to nonexistent.
And yet dismissing The Tudors as “bad history” misses something interesting.
It is extraordinarily good at communicating the instability of proximity to absolute power.
People rise spectacularly.
Then they disappear.
Wolsey dominates government.
Then Wolsey falls.
Thomas More possesses Henry’s affection.
Then More loses his head.
Anne becomes the centre of Henry’s universe.
Then Anne becomes an inconvenience.
Cromwell rises through intelligence and usefulness.
We know what eventually awaits Cromwell too.
The details may sometimes be wrong.
The atmosphere of insecurity is not.
The court revolves around one man whose favour can transform someone’s existence.
That brings us to another distinction historical fiction reveals particularly well:
rank and power are not necessarily the same thing.
A duke possessed enormous status.
But someone of lesser rank who had daily private access to Henry could exercise extraordinary influence.
The royal bedchamber was therefore political territory.
Who dressed Henry?
Who entertained him?
Who hunted with him?
Who could speak to him when he was relaxed?
Who could whisper something when no councillor was present?
Those questions mattered.
Historical drama can make that system visible in ways that lists of Tudor offices sometimes cannot.
And Then There Is Shardlake
C. J. Sansom takes a substantially different approach.
Matthew Shardlake never existed.
That is precisely why he is so useful.
Sansom does not need to pretend that we possess Shardlake’s private thoughts.
He invented them.
But around his fictional lawyer Sansom constructed a remarkably carefully researched Tudor England.
Shardlake can therefore walk through real historical processes without requiring Sansom constantly to invent the inner lives of famous historical people.
In Dissolution, Shardlake encounters the destruction of the monasteries.
The political programme is real.
Thomas Cromwell is real.
The religious upheaval is real.
The detective is not.
That fictional observer allows Sansom to ask a question conventional political history sometimes neglects:
What would living through this actually have been like?
Sansom himself described the attraction of historical fiction as getting into a character’s boots and attempting to see, hear and feel the world as that person might have experienced it.
That is historical fiction at its strongest.
But Sansom recognised the danger too.
Human emotions may remain recognisable across centuries, while assumptions about religion, society, authority, medicine, class and the universe itself can be radically different.
A Tudor person cannot simply be a twenty-first-century person wearing tights.
Shardlake occasionally approaches that boundary.
He is unusually sceptical, unusually humane and unusually capable of questioning the assumptions surrounding him.
Sansom knew this criticism and argued that sixteenth-century humanism and emerging traditions of rational enquiry made someone like Shardlake at least conceivable.
That is an important distinction.
Historical fiction does not necessarily need to prove:
This person existed.
It sometimes needs only to demonstrate:
This person could have existed.
Sansom’s Contract With the Reader
Sansom did something else extremely valuable.
He showed his workings.
His novels contain substantial historical notes explaining where fact ends and invention begins.
That creates an implicit contract between novelist and reader:
I have invented a story, but I will tell you where I have interfered with the historical record.
Remarkably, research for Sovereign — the Shardlake novel dealing with Henry VIII’s 1541 northern royal progress — led Sansom deeply enough into the historical evidence that he published academic research concerning the progress.
That makes Sovereign particularly appropriate for our next excursion into Tudor history.
Tomorrow we will examine the enormous logistical and political undertaking of a Royal Progress.
Shardlake has already gone ahead of us.
Ken Follett and History From Below
Ken Follett employs another method.
Rather than concentrating primarily upon kings and queens, Follett frequently invents families, workers, craftsmen, merchants and communities through whom enormous historical transformations can be experienced.
His fictional town of Kingsbridge becomes a laboratory of history.
A law changes.
Someone loses work.
A machine appears.
Someone’s livelihood disappears.
Grain prices rise.
Someone goes hungry.
War begins.
Someone’s son is conscripted.
Industrialisation occurs.
Someone becomes wealthy.
Someone else becomes redundant.
This is history viewed from below.
And Follett is particularly effective at demonstrating something easily forgotten when reading conventional histories:
People living through history do not know how it ends.
We do.
A character living in 1795 does not know that Britain will eventually defeat Napoleon.
A medieval mason does not know whether his cathedral will survive.
A worker watching machinery enter a mill does not know that historians will later call what is happening the Industrial Revolution.
He merely knows that something has arrived that may destroy his livelihood.
That difference in perspective is enormously important.
The Grain Riot Problem
Consider a food riot.
A conventional history might tell us:
Poor harvests caused grain prices to rise, producing disturbances in several towns.
Accurate.
Useful.
But emotionally distant.
A novelist can show a woman entering a market and discovering that the price of bread has doubled.
Her children are hungry.
She sees grain being loaded onto a cart for sale elsewhere.
Someone shouts that the grain belongs to the community.
The crowd stops the cart.
Perhaps they seize the grain.
Perhaps — as happened in some real food disturbances — they insist upon selling it at what they regard as a morally legitimate price.
Suddenly the reader understands something historians have called the moral economy.
The fictional woman never existed.
The economic assumptions governing her behaviour certainly did.
This is where historical fiction can sometimes teach social history more effectively than a catalogue of dates.
The Follett Method
Follett has spoken openly about his dislike of factual errors.
His journalism background left him with the conviction that getting small details wrong makes readers wonder what else is wrong.
He therefore researches the historical environment carefully while allowing fictional characters to inhabit it.
That distinction matters.
A fictional conversation between two fictional mill workers is obviously invented.
A fictional conversation between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn occupies more dangerous territory because audiences may remember it as something Henry and Anne actually said.
The closer fiction moves towards documented historical individuals, the greater its responsibility becomes.
Hilary Mantel and the Cromwell Problem
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels demonstrate the issue brilliantly.
Mantel gives us Thomas Cromwell from the inside.
It is magnificent fiction.
But we cannot actually enter Cromwell’s consciousness.
Mantel must create him.
Her Cromwell is an interpretation built from evidence and imagination.
Change the viewpoint and the entire Tudor world changes.
Cromwell can become reformer.
Or bureaucratic genius.
Or ruthless political fixer.
Or loyal royal servant.
Or architect of judicial murder.
He can even be several of these simultaneously.
Anne Boleyn changes too.
Seen through Anne’s imagined consciousness, Cromwell might appear threatening.
Seen through Cromwell’s imagined consciousness, Anne may become the threat.
Neither viewpoint is neutral merely because the furniture is historically accurate.
Historical Fiction Creates Memories
This is perhaps its greatest danger.
Human beings remember stories extraordinarily well.
Sometimes better than facts.
A viewer watches an invented scene.
Years later the details of its origin disappear.
What remains is:
I remember that Henry VIII did that.
Except Henry didn’t.
An actor did.
This is especially powerful when a performance becomes culturally definitive.
For millions of people, a particular actor eventually becomes a historical person.
Natalie Dormer becomes Anne Boleyn.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers becomes Henry VIII.
A beautifully constructed fictional scene can therefore overpower an uncertain historical record.
That does not make historical drama illegitimate.
It makes historical literacy important.
But Historians Tell Stories Too
There is another uncomfortable truth.
Historians are also storytellers.
They select evidence.
They decide where their story begins.
They decide what matters.
They decide which evidence deserves emphasis.
Two reputable historians can examine substantially the same material and produce different interpretations.
That does not mean history is fiction.
Evidence constrains historians in ways it does not constrain novelists.
A historian cannot legitimately invent a letter because the argument would work better if one existed.
But historical writing still involves interpretation.
Complete neutrality is impossible.
The important distinction is not therefore:
History = truth.
Historical fiction = lies.
It is closer to:
History makes arguments about the past that must remain accountable to evidence.
Historical fiction uses evidence and imagination to construct experiences that may illuminate the past.
When Fiction Becomes Historically Valuable
Historical fiction is particularly powerful when it reconstructs aspects of life poorly represented in elite sources.
How did servants experience a royal household?
What happened to communities when monasteries disappeared?
What did ordinary Catholics understand about Henry’s break with Rome?
How quickly did religious changes penetrate rural England?
How did women negotiate legal systems designed largely by men?
How did workers understand mechanisation before economists gave it terminology?
How did people experience hunger, disease, childbirth, disability, sexuality, ageing or religious fear?
Official documents often tell us what governments wanted people to do.
Fiction can ask what it felt like to have government doing it to you.
The Test
Perhaps the best historical fiction can be judged by several simple questions.
Does it respect established facts where those facts are known?
Does it distinguish plausible invention from deliberate distortion?
Does it reproduce the assumptions of the historical period rather than merely dressing modern people in historical clothes?
Does it encourage curiosity?
And, most importantly:
Does finishing the story make us want to discover what actually happened?
If the answer to that final question is yes, historical fiction has performed an enormously valuable service.
Because The Tudors may send someone searching for Anne Boleyn.
Shardlake may send someone searching for the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Follett may send someone searching for the Combination Acts, food riots or Luddites.
Mantel may send someone searching for Thomas Cromwell.
The fiction becomes a doorway.
History waits on the other side.
The Woman on the Scaffold
And so we return to Anne.
We know where she was on the morning of 19 May 1536.
We know that an executioner from Calais had been obtained.
We know Anne was executed by sword rather than axe.
We possess accounts of her final speech, although exact wording should always be treated cautiously.
We know the outcome.
What we cannot fully recover is the woman standing there.
Her private terror.
Her thoughts about Henry.
Whether she still expected some extraordinary last-minute intervention.
What she thought about the men who had already died.
What she believed had brought her to that scaffold.
History takes us remarkably close.
Then the evidence stops.
The novelist takes another step.
The camera moves towards Anne’s face.
The actress looks towards the Tower.
Music rises.
And suddenly something strange happens.
We know we are watching something that did not literally happen.
Yet for perhaps thirty seconds we understand, more vividly than a date in a textbook could ever communicate, that a living woman was about to die because the political and personal world surrounding Henry VIII had turned against her.
That emotional recognition is not evidence.
It is not history.
But neither is it worthless.
It is one of historical fiction’s greatest gifts.
History tells us that Anne Boleyn died on 19 May 1536.
Historical fiction asks us to imagine what it meant to be alive on 18 May.
And somewhere between those two sentences lies the extraordinary power — and the extraordinary danger — of telling stories about the past.
Tim Alderman©️2026
Sources and Further Reading
C. J. Sansom, Dissolution, Sovereign, Heartstone and the wider Shardlake series.
C. J. Sansom interviews discussing historical research, Tudor mentalities and the construction of Matthew Shardlake.
Ken Follett interviews on historical research and the relationship between fictional characters and documented events.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light.
Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn.
G. W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions.
Alison Weir, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn.
Suzannah Lipscomb’s work on Henry VIII and the Tudor court.
History Hit, recent documentaries and articles reassessing Anne Boleyn, including The Face of Anne Boleyn: Capturing a Queen.
Michael Hirst, creator and writer of The Tudors, interviews discussing the series’ approach to historical fact and dramatic invention.
E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” an influential study of the social assumptions underlying many food disturbances.
