Fighting an Icon

As a historical writer, how do you best portray a battle that has become iconic? How do you peel away its layers of misunderstandings, propaganda and historical inaccuracies?

It was a question raised last night in London at a talk entitled Greatest Battles with the historical novelists Simon Scarrow, Saul David and Patrick Mercer discussing this and many other issues. I’ll write more on what they had to say in a later post but Simon Scarrow in particular talked about the difficulties of writing about a battle, in his case, Waterloo, that most of his readership knows something about and still make it fresh and exciting. For Saul David, writing about the battle of Rorke’s Drift in South Africa, he had the added complication of the well-known film, Zulu, with Michael Caine to battle with.

I’m writing about the Battle of the Boyne, a battle of relative insignificance, militarily but of prime importance politically, holding an iconic status for people in the north of Ireland with its resonant image of William of Orange on his white charger. I’m also writing about the first siege of Limerick which holds its own cherished status for people in the south of Ireland.

So where do you start?

You can do as George MacDonald Fraser did so successfully in his Flashman series and ignore modern historians, concentrating purely on the personal accounts of the participants while also leaning on the historians of the Victorian age with their old-style narrative sweep. That might allow modern iconography to be stripped away and the attitudes of the time to be more clearly revealed.

Or you could apply the holistic, more scientific and culturally sensitive, methods of modern historians, concentrating on the economic and societal aspects of the time and the minutiae of battlefield archaeology. This could allow you to contextualise the battle for a modern readership.

You could do both.

What’s best though for the historical novelist?