NO BONES ABOUT IT
Historian Lucy Worsley brings the past alive in new docuseries
THERE are few historians working in TV today who can make the past come alive quite like Lucy Worsley. The British historian, author, presenter, and Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces has taken us into the feminist origins of British Romance, the palaces of the Russian Tsars and even to Henry VIII’s Christmas table.
Worsley’s latest historical docuseries on PBS is called “Lucy Worsley Investigates.” The four part series, with two episodes premiering this month and two more this fall, casts Worsley in the role of detective. Her cases are some of the most contentiously debated episodes in British history: who killed the Princes in the Tower, what affliction caused the Madness of King George, what sparked the Jacobean Witch Craze of the late 16th Century. and what really happened during the infamous Black Death.
Worsley partners with scholars and scientists to look at the real, hard-boiled evidence in each case. More importantly, she uses each mystery to examine a bigger picture, whether it’s about childhood in medieval times or the historic lack of mental health resources for the poor.
Worsley answered a few questions about her series.
How did this idea come to you?
We thought it would be fun to look at stories from history that people might still talk about at the water cooler, if you like. Certainly where I work at Hampton Court Palace ... We love a historical mystery and we thought we’d select ones where there still seems to be some element of the unknown, something that was confusing, something that was mysterious.
How important is it for you to weave in primary sources for the audience?
In this series, we’ve taken a bit of a risk with it, actually. The show is about history, but it’s also about the work of the historian. It’s about the journey of investigation the historian goes on, and that really does involve evidence. And we do get down and dirty with the evidence here, which to me is such a joy and a privilege and going to places and handling original documents.
How do you as a historian feel about the general populace finding out about the Madness of King George from “Bridgerton”?
I feel really divided on this because as someone who works in the field of history, I’m happy to take any tool at all that will get people over the threshold and into the world of the past. I’m not proud.
What I worry about, though, is that people sometimes say, “Is ‘so and so’, a period drama, accurate?” And as a historian I’m thinking, you’re making a category error even asking me that question. People don’t make drama to be accurate. They make drama to tell a story, to give us insight into the human condition, to express character, to give us knowledge about the world and ourselves. And if you want to find out what happened, then you need to watch a really well-researched history documentary, don’t you? Don’t watch “Bridgerton,” watch my show instead!
You’ve cited as consultants
Professor Tim Thornton, Arthur Burns, Julia Richardson. How much did you rely upon them for factual research?
I often feel sad, really, that people see me on screen and think that I’m somehow omniscient and I just know all this stuff. No! Behind the scenes, there’s a huge, huge team of people. It’s one of the reasons it’s fun to make a TV program, because it’s so collaborative and I genuinely learned so much from doing it from people like Arthur Burns and Tim Thornton and Turi King, the geneticist. It’s like going back to school for me.
The next two installments are the Black Death and the Witch Craze. Is there anything you can tease about those two that you’re excited for people to see this fall?
We’ve got two really contrasting stories here. Both of them quite dark stories. The first of them is about a midwife in Scotland in the later 16th century who was accused of witchcraft and who was killed. It’s a sad story that these things happened to her. It’s also a sort of celebration of her because we’ve been able to tell the world that she existed and to chase her through the archives.
The other one is again, a horrible but slightly positive story about a woman, Olivia Cranmer. I don’t want to make it out like it’s a happy story, it’s not, it’s just devastating to think about that level of mortality. In fact, when we were doing that one, I asked one of the leading historians of the Black Death, Professor John Hatcher who appears in the program. I said, “Why would anybody study the Black Death?” and he said, “’Cause it’ll make you feel good about coronavirus.” Because the mortality was possibly half the population. This is the thing about history, there’s never all good or all bad. What it did do was reduce population so that standards of living could rise and in the wake of the Black Death, there was kind of the equivalent of ... the Great Resignation that you read about in the papers today, people coming out of coronavirus and thinking, “I don’t want to go back to the rat race, I’m going to give up my job!” The workers did that in the wake of the Black Death.
They said, “We want higher wages, c’mon! We’re not going back to work for you lot, we can see that you need us more than you used to.”