Point of view, and the reliability of narrators, are of great interest to writers. I’m just under halfway through reading “Power and reputation at the court of Louis XIII” by Sharon Kettering. This is research for the fifth book in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures series.
My research so far has included biographies of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, both by Elizabeth Marvick, and a biography of Marie de Medici by Julia Pardoe. The subtitle of Kettering’s book is: “The career of Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes (1578 – 1621)”. Marie de Medici, Louis XIII and Charles d’Albert all feature in the third book of my series, The Suggested Assassin. Marie de Medici also appears in the first book, The Spy who Sank the Armada.
I suppose many people’s view of Cardinal Richelieu is of the evil mastermind of The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas. I have to admit that I’m excited about bringing my subsequent books into contact with Dumas’s characters. Marvick’s biography of Richelieu left me with a generally sympathetic view of him. He was undoubtably a genius, and a very capable first minister.
Pardoe’s biography painted a very sympathetic view of Marie, and was very hostile towards Charles d’Albert. According to Pardoe, Charles was Louis’s favourite, who turned the young king against his mother.
I suppose it’s difficult not to empathise with your main character. It’s all about your point of view. They say that history is written by the victors, and that’s what Kettering points out so well. Virtually everything we know about Charles d’Albert was propaganda written and promulgated by his replacement as Louis XIII’s first minister, Cardinal Richelieu.
Kettering has done a wonderful job of digging really deeply through Richelieu’s smear campaign. I now see Charles d’Albert as a sympathetic friend and fatherly figure to the adolescent king. He treated him with the respect that he was not getting from his mother or her favourites.
I think the time period which my fifth book is going to have to cover is 1613 to 1617. There aren’t any significant changes that I need to make to my portrayal of Louis, Marie, and Charles. I’m happy with how I presented them in The Suggested Assassin. What I do need to do is think very carefully about point of view, and the reliability of narrators. There is plenty of historical conflict to draw on. I must think about how that conflict seems from each point of view.