The Real War of Thrones (Season 2) – Sky History

Absolutely loving this!   I sometimes say that there are too many Tudor-era documentaries on TV, made at the expense of looking into other eras; but this one’s different, because it doesn’t just look at one country.  The centrepoint is the French Wars of Religion, but it looks into how that fitted into what was going on elsewhere.  I remember a wonderful aide-memoire from A-level days – that Elizabeth I sought to fight the Spanish in the Netherlands to the last drop of French blood.  Confusing?  Oh, gloriously so!   And, after three episodes, we’re only up to 1569 , so we haven’t even got to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre yet.   The next episode is entitled “Blood Wedding”, just in case anyone doesn’t know what’s coming!

The programme’s done in what seems to be in the “in” way now, with actors playing the parts of the historical figures and the presenter acting as narrator but not actually being seen.  Maybe it’s “dumbing down” a bit, but it does work better than the old-style programmes which had a presenter sitting behind a desk and just talking.  The American narrator is doing my head in a bit, with his talk about Toodors and Stooarts and the Dookes of Guise, but I suppose you can’t have everything.

So, what’s going on?   Well, Henry VIII wanted the infant Mary Queen of Scots to marry the future Edward VI, but, instead, she was shipped off to France and married to Francois, the heir to the French throne  – son of Henri II, who despite spending most of his time with his mistress Diane de Poitiers, had managed to father ten children on his wife, Catherine de Medici, she of alleged poisoned gloves fame.  Edward then died, and was succeeded by Mary, who married Philip II of Spain (Aragon and Castile).  Then Mary died, and was succeeded by Elizabeth.  Then Francis died.  Numerous suitors were suggested for both Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots.  Elizabeth kept ’em dangling.  Mary married Lord Darnley, and then he died in mysterious circumstances and she … well, we don’t know whether she went off with Bothwell or whether he forced her, but this programme insisted that they were lovers and didn’t even say that there were big doubts over what actually happened.  That actually quite annoyed me.   There are big doubts over what actually happened.

Meanwhile, there were ongoing political and sometimes military clashes in France between the Catholics, led by the Guises, the maternal uncles of Mary Queen of Scots, and the Protestants.   And, in the Netherlands, there’d been a revolt against Spanish rule.  England hadn’t got stuck in yet, but would do later – largely through getting the French to get stuck in, in the hope of winning Elizabeth’s hand in marriage.  And the French Wars of Religion were supposed to be being sorted by marrying the king (three brothers all became king and all died young, so it got very confusing, but the king at this point was Charles IX)’s sister Margot to the Protestant Henry of Navarre, but, of course, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre took place a few days later.

We did all this for A-level.  OK, it was very gory, but it was also very exciting.  This is the sort of stuff which kids like to learn about, not motte and bailey castles or the daily lives of medieval monks, which we had to do in the first year.  This was exciting and fast-moving, full of romance and fighting, and guaranteed to keep the attention of viewers, whether kids or adults.   More series like this, please!!

 

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Beatrix: The Queen Who Gave Up The Crown – Channel 5

 

This is a very promising move from Channel 5.  We’ve had some excellent programmes on the recent history of the British Royal Family, but, whilst I understand that it was difficult to film new material during lockdown, there really is only so much you can say about the Abdication, the Margaret-Townsend affair and the War of the Waleses.  Some programmes about the Continental royal families would be extremely welcome.  The title of the programme was rather silly, because it made it sound as if Beatrix did something like Edward VIII did, rather than abdicating at the age of 75 after a 33-year reign, but the actual substance of the programme was very interesting.

The Netherlands is a fascinating country, because historically it’s very puritanical but also very liberal, and very tolerant but with strong extremist elements on several different sides, and we saw how Beatrix – and it was lovely to see her looking so well at the memorial service for Prince Philip – had to steer her way through that.  She met with protests on her wedding day, because she was marrying a German, and protests on the day of her investiture, because of concerns over the Dutch Royal Family’s wealth, and she also had to deal with her husband’s long battle with depression and the death of one of her sons.   She was initially seen as being very aloof, but later as being very warm – the ongoing conflict between a royal family retaining its mystique whilst at the same time being seen as relevant and accessible.  And she’s been a lot more outspoken about politics than most royals have been.

I do love the way that orange is the Dutch national colour,and that that’s because of the House of Orange-Nassau (er, even if Orange itself is actually in France).   I suppose that green’s the colour of the Republic of Ireland, but there isn’t a national colour of England or the UK, and it’d be nice if there was.  But never mind!

All in all, this was very good, and I’m hoping that we might see some more programmes about the Continental royals.   There’s certainly plenty of material to go at.

 

 

The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton

This is a very interesting book, although the style won’t appeal to everyone, about the Kindertransport and one of the women who was most important in it.  Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, known as “Truus”, was a Dutch (Protestant) woman involved in rescuing Jewish children, initially connections of her own friends and acquaintances, from Nazi Germany, from as early as 1933, going to Germany herself and bringing them to the Netherlands, which became more and more difficult as all countries tightened immigration rules.  When the British government agreed to the establishment of the Kindertransport programme, in 1938, Truus was asked by the Refugee Children’s Movement in Britain to travel to Vienna, meet Adolf Eichmann there in person, and try to persuade him to agree to let children from Austria be evacuated.  He tried to trick her by saying that the plan could go ahead if she could arrange for exactly 600 children to leave, in a very short space of time – and she managed to do it.

In total, around 10,000 children were brought to safety in Britain.  The book ends in 1939, but Truus continued to help refugees throughout the war, despite being arrested more than once, turning down the chance to leave the occupied Netherlands for safety in Britain herself.  She was unable to have children herself, and the book shows the sadness that this caused her and her husband Joop, but became known as the “mother of 1,001 children”.

The book’s partly about Truus, and partly about three fictional characters – a teenage boy, a teenage girl, and the boy’s younger brother – who become three of the 600.  The style of writing isn’t the most readable I’ve ever come across, but it’s a fascinating story.  We see Truus in action, and also her home life, and we see how the lives of the two teenagers, misfits who’ve become close to each other,  and their families are torn apart.  There’s also a toy Peter Rabbit.  I’m not sure how big Beatrix Potter was in inter-war Austria, but rabbits seem to be a bit of a thing in books about children escaping from the Nazis.

We also see just how quickly things changed in Austria.  It wasn’t a gradual process as it was in Germany.  Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, was opposed to the Anschluss, and Austria had no equivalent to the Nuremberg Laws until it was taken over.

The title of the book refers to the last Kindertransport train, which was from Prague, to depart before war declared.  It never reached the Netherlands, and no-one knows what happened to the children on it – but, sadly, I think we can probably imagine.  It does have a link to the characters, but it’d be a spoiler to say what.

Some of the language jars slightly: no-one in 1939 said “chalkboard” rather than “blackboard”, and a British person would have said “disembark” rather than “debark”.  OK, OK, that’s nitpicking; but it’s quite a strange book, with newspaper cuttings (which I think are actually fictional, although what they say is factual) about the latest events included in between every few chapters.  I thought it worked quite well, but people might find it off-putting.

It’s also quite unusual in that not only do Hitler, Eichmann and other Nazis feature as characters but we actually see things from Eichmann’s point of view in some scenes.  He has to be included because Truus did meet him in person, but it’s quite strange when we actually “see” his thoughts.  And the book does jump about a lot, between the different characters – not just the main characters, but various minor characters as well.  However, it’s a very interesting story – both the part about Truus, largely based on fact, and the part about the children, who are fictional but who speak for so many real children who were parted from their families by horrific events, but whose lives were saved,

The Kindertransport was sanctioned by the government here in that they agreed to make an exception to the immigration laws in the case of the children concerned,  but it was all organised by private individuals.  The treasurer of the Refugee Children’s Movement went to my old school, and two of the prominent committee members name-checked in the book went to our brother school.  Sorry, I just had to say that!  I’m not just being cliquey, honestly: I’m making a point that these were ordinary people, not aristocrats or politicians or celebs.  They put in a huge amount of work to persuade the government to agree to it, to raise money and win popular support, and to find homes for the children.  We’ve rather lost that civil society thing now: governments are expected to deal with anything and everything.  The work that these people did, on a voluntary basis, was very admirable, to put it mildly.

But they, at least, were safe in Britain – it was Truus who actually went into the Third Reich, putting herself in danger, to bring the children out, and without any personal reason for doing so, only that she wanted to help.  I’ve read better books than this, but it’s an amazing story, and she was an amazing woman.