The True History of the Blackadder (11 page)

Ricardians have worked tirelessly (and indeed tiresomely) to point out the justice of Richard’s claim and the injustice of his defamed
legacy for so long that the jolly depiction of the King in the Blackadder Chronicles no longer seems at all outlandish. It’s universally accepted that the hunchbacked bloodthirsty baddie so indelibly glued into the nation’s psyche by Shakespeare, to the delight of Henry VII’s ginger granddaughter, is a bad joke. A lick of black paint on the shoulder of an official portrait here, an imaginatively damning reconstruction of his reign by Sir Thomas More there, and Dirty Dick became an official bogeyman, By Royal Appointment. Admittedly, Richard did himself few favours PR-wise by putting himself in the frame for the murder of his nephews in the Tower, but then his one fatal error was to be killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Until then, he had done all he could to secure the crown, and clear away all false claimants.

Henry Tudor himself had only the most pitiful claim to the throne, being a Welsh descendant of Henry V’s widow on his father’s side, and from a line of Plantagenet bastards, the Beauforts, on his mother’s. He got round this by marrying Edward’s daughter Elizabeth, but as the daughter of a bastard herself, she also had about as much claim to the throne as the privy-scrubbers, making the entire Tudor dynasty – right of conquest aside – illegitimate. To have thrived as King on such laughably shaky credentials, fighting off pretenders from all sides, is remarkable – but could Tudor have been hiding more? Was even his right of conquest a forgery, having simply strolled into an empty castle stacked high with the poisoned bodies of every Yorkist in line to the throne (bar the easily overpowered Lord Percy, Duke of Northumberland), and just taken over? Is it conceivable that his propaganda skills extended to convincing the whole of Christendom that an entire reign had not taken place, and that there had been no Richard IV at all?

Being a royal child in the late Middle Ages was far from being all larks. Even resembling a blue-eyed legitimate Yorkist could earn you the attentions of some disaffected nobleman, ready to claim you as his own puppet King, one of the two Princes miraculously saved from
execution – and Henry VII would make mincemeat of you in the end. Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, both famed pretenders to be demolished by Tudor one way or another, established legends of their own despite the propaganda machine. It’s generally believed that the sickly uncrowned Edward V may have died in youth anyway, but his hale and hearty monkey of a little brother, Richard of Shrewsbury – twelve years old at the time of his disappearance, by existing records – became a prime target for treasonous romance. It’s also alleged that a bastard son of Richard III could have been legitimised on Dick’s triumph at Bosworth (he is said to have lived out his life as a bricklayer in Essex), but if Tudor
had
been vanquished on 22 August 1485, and Richard III subsequently died, the teenage Shrewsbury would have been a cert for the crown. Had he been alive.

That this theoretical Richard IV could conceivably have had two sons in their early twenties (born a decade before him, by official record) is an undeniable complication. The historian J. H. W. Lloyd suggested that Henry VII’s management of the switchover to the Gregorian calendar at the end of the fifteenth century explained away the apparent inconsistencies of the Blackadder Chronicles, but to imagine the ramifications of deleting at least a couple of decades of British history does tend to make the brain ache.

But then, why would the Blackadder family falsify this claim? The figure of Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh (1461–99), that emerges from their Chronicles is hardly a dashing Hotspur of an ancestor to crow about – even his famed nom de plume is accredited to a peasant, Baldrick. This naming in itself causes problems for the Blackadder history, which also records that Edmund was the bastard son of Donald, Third Duke of Argyll,
^fn1
and took on the ‘Black Adder’ moniker independently. This is clearly at odds with the family history, which claims to trace the Blackadder bloodline back to pre-Roman Britain, and includes
the Domesday compiler the Duc d’Blackadder and inept crusader the Baron de Blackadder. Unless Argyll was a Blackadder bastard himself, it seems safe to assume that one of the few Blackadder kin who were not hiding from the dangers of the Yorkist/Lancastrian wars was also intimately acquainted with Edmund’s mother, Gertrude of Flanders.
^fn2
It can only be presumed that the servant Baldrick had heard of such gossip, and cunningly gave his master his true birth name by stealth.

The question remains as to why this forefather of the Blackadder who either commissioned or wrote the Blackadder Chronicles was clearly shown to be such a loser – arriving late for the Battle of Bosworth, ignored by the royal line into which he had been falsely sown, and presumably only managing to pass on his genes and create his own bastard due to some freak moment of passion involving mistaken identity. The only reason for the record of his exploits can be because, by sheer default, this Edmund was indeed King of England, although for only thirty seconds.

As the first academic to gain access to the Chronicles, J. H. W. Lloyd admitted that the endlessly revised history is an exhausting tangle of self-aggrandising lies and exaggeration peppered with embarrassing moments of candour and unintended confession, thanks to what the historian termed ‘long-winded tirades where the various authors furiously insist on absolving themselves from any blame for such events as the crash of the R101, the Indian Mutiny, the loss of the American colonies or the sinking of the
Lusitania
. Since no such involvement had ever occurred to one, one can only assume that all these things were in some way the fault of the Blackadder in question.’ It’s fair to assume, then, that the Blackadder Chronicler was not overly occupied with constructing a wholly believable series of hagiographies, or lacked the skill to do so. But if these Chronicles have any one aim, it is to try to establish a strong case for the family’s rightful claim to the English crown. Perhaps the
undeniably unflattering biography of the original ‘King Edmund III’
^fn3
was written in such a way as to add credence to his place in the annals of our history. Certainly, all subsequent Blackadders celebrated in the family journal would be depicted in a far more flattering light.

So is this one central claim as much a sham as so many of the Blackadder Chroniclers’ boasts? Professor Justin Pollard, as well as being the History elf for
QI
, is one of cinema’s most in-demand historical experts, having built a career on sniffing out fact from fiction for movies such as
Elizabeth
and
Atonement
, and when faced with the ‘alternative history’ of 1485–99, states: ‘The political intricacies of the Wars of the Roses do pose substantial problems to qualified historians, problems which take on yet more gargantuan proportions when placed in the hands of the writers and putative “keepers” of the Blackadder Chronicles. The characterisation of Edward IV as “a huge, whoremongering yob of a despot” is somewhat at odds with what we know of this brilliant military leader and sophisticated statesman. Furthermore, J. H. W. Lloyd’s contention that the otherwise wholly unrecorded Blackadder monarch can be fitted into the royal chronology by docking twenty years from that century fails to account for the fact that centuries have a relentless habit of lasting a hundred years, or that the Gregorian calendar did not exist before 1582 and was not adopted in Britain until 1752.’

Of course, not being allowed access to the Chronicles in full, it’s only natural that many historians will take such a cynical view. It certainly takes a great deal more effort to construct a scenario in which a single word of the history of Prince Edmund could be true than it does to take Henry VII’s word for it, and fall into line with canonical Tudor history. But that, it should go without saying, is just what Tudor always hoped would be the case.

^fn1
The nobleman’s true identity has escaped public record.

^fn2
You can also save yourself the bother of checking for Gertrude in the official records.

^fn3
After two Saxon kings, including the tenth-century King Edmund, blandly named ‘the deed-doer’.

Chapter Two

THE BLACK ADDER

We few, we happy few, we band of ruthless bastards!
All for one – and each man for himself!

By 1982, Rowan Atkinson was an established Prince of Comedy – indeed, the establishment took him to their hearts – and the spoils of his rise were there to be revelled in. After an extensive period of seeking a habitable castle to call his home, he gave up and settled into a handsome rectory in Oxfordshire, where he lived with his girlfriend, Leslie Ash, one of Britain’s most idolised young actresses. He was the unmistakable star of the BBC’s hottest comedy in a generation, and was even contracted to appear alongside Sean Connery in his shock return to the role of James Bond, in
Never Say Never Again
– specifically added to the movie at the last minute by writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to capitalise on his popularity. Admittedly his eventual performance as weedy MI6 pen-pusher Nigel Small-Fawcett remains Atkinson’s least favourite – ‘There aren’t many things I look back on with dismay, but that was one. There was something so clichéd about it. I was hoping to have done a character rather than a caricature’ – but it showed that a movie career could be no idle dream for him.

There had been setbacks – his show for the 1980 Edinburgh Fringe, coming halfway between the second and third series of
Not
, hadn’t sat
well with the critics, many of whom saw the TV star as an interloper, as he complained to Michael Dale. ‘They will tend, like the record press, to praise anyone who’s unknown and pour large buckets of excreta over anyone who is known. Indeed that’s how most of our media thrive and that was the first time I’d experienced the backlash of fame. In terms of the rest of the country, I was still just budding, but in terms of the Fringe I was virtually a failure.’ Despite this, he was happy to accept a place on the board of directors for the Fringe, and would return often, with or without a show.

I Spurn You As I Would Spurn a Rabid Dog!

Two series bookended 1980, putting John and Rowan on the BAFTA stage for the first time, with the latter claiming the Light Entertainment Performance Award, but there was no series of
Not
for the whole of 1981. Through his live shows however, the upward trajectory of Atkinson’s career did not waver. November 1980 saw his Royal Variety Performance debut, and it wouldn’t be long after that he was named the Royal Variety Club Showbiz Personality of the Year. A four-month UK tour in the autumn had given his fans a chance to see what he did best – as he told the
Daily Mail
, in his own estimation, ‘I’m just not at my best on television, working around the clock for sketches which last two minutes at the most; all that whiz, bang, crash stuff. I much prefer the stage where I can stretch myself and really develop my act.’

The combination of well-travelled Fringe material, brand-new sketches and
Not
hits was ultimately commemorated on vinyl, as
Rowan Atkinson Live in Belfast
, recorded at the Grand Opera House in September, and rushed out for Christmas 1980. In this one-and-a-half-man show, Atkinson was of course accompanied by Curtis in the two-handers, while Goodall joined them on the road to provide the music for classic numbers like ‘Do Bears Sha La La’ and his solo spot, ‘I Hate
the French’. Ever the technician, however, Rowan always prepared his own sound-effects tapes at home.

‘The Ranting Man’ turned up to berate the audience for paying to see the ‘rubber-faced twat’, but bottoms still filled seats in their droves, with Atkinson’s Oxford homecoming an especial riot. Atkinson and Curtis’s sketches tended to be low-key affairs, episodes centred on the tiniest details of life, such as being stuck behind a student in the post office, but the new monologues gave Rowan far more metaphysical scope, especially the sketch eventually called ‘Welcome to Hell’, in which his louche, acerbic Devil, Toby, showcased the performer’s unique skill with casual invective.