Fake is the New Real
From Anne Boleyn to Sigmund Freud
By Henrietta Foster
The world is on fire. Rassemblement National beating Emmanuel Macron, Viktor Orbán assuming the EU presidency, far-right judges ruling Trump is above the law.
The ghastly and unpalatable fact is that people like Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage do not know when to leave the stage, taking with them their violent rhetoric.
I am tired beyond belief of these vile populists clogging up what little there is left of my time on this burning planet.
Surely, we all deserve better. It can’t all end like this. But maybe it has to.
Everything seems to conspire against me and lead me into the depths of fakery and tomfoolery—or something suitably portentous like that.
Well, at the very least, I can retreat into the much cherished and hugely missed world of my early adolescence from the golden age of the television programmes I loved way back then.
It seems that in 2024, I am not the only one who wants to escape back into a world of make-believe where everything is seen in a 3×4 ratio, bad wigs and clumsy, unsaturated colours.
As a preteen, I truly loved The Six Wives of Henry VIII and its sequel, Elizabeth R. I got all the books and the 45-rpm records for birthdays and Christmas.
In a flash of nauseating childish exuberance, I even played all six wives in a school Christmas play put on for an audience from the local home for old-age pensioners.
A picture of me in a wig and a big Miss Haversham-style 100% by-nylon pure white lace jumble sale wedding dress pulling a cracker with an old dear in a twinset and pearls made the front page of The Kensington Post.
It was a heady and sadly not-to-be-repeated taste of fame and notoriety.
Endless hours were spent with one school friend debating which wife one wanted to be and who was really at fault. Everyone, of course, loved Jane Seymour and Catharine Parr, but they were a tad dull.
I had a sneaking affection for Anne of Cleves because she survived. She did not have to submit herself to Henry’s raucous behaviour or scary bedroom antics but instead made a happy transition from the Queen to the King’s Sister. Catherine of Aragon was hugely sinned against but rather sour and bitter.
The greatest time was spent analysing Catherine Howard and Anne Boleyn. They were like those distant sixth-form girls who wore black kohl around their eyes put on with a safety pin, see-through embroidered peasant blouses and tight jeans.
We openly despised these girls in our first years, but secretly, we desperately wanted to be them. Such simple days when our idea of heaven was a pair of red velvet Fiorucci jeans, a striped Biba T-shirt, and embossed leather flip-flops from Indiacraft.
We knew Anne of Cleves and Catherine of Aragon would have worn all that if they had been at Holland Park Comprehensive. Okay, we could bask in the glory of being told that Maria Schneider, Ari-Up from The Slits and Anjelica Huston has been six formers at our notorious school.
But somehow, the medieval royals seemed more real – until we discovered Anna Karenina.
Hever Castle, built in the 14th century, was the home of the Boleyn family. The fortress is set in glorious countryside less than an hour from London.
The Boleyn residence is as it was when Anne lived there, but the uber-rich Astors, who bought the house in 1903, added a hotel and a golf course. Real Tudor and Hollywood Tudor side by side.
Recently, the castle has displayed a new portrait of Anne Boleyn and her prayer book with her annotations in the margins. Last month, it held a press conference to announce the opening of her apartments on the west side of Hever, as Anne would have known it…or something of that sort.
Hever press conferences always feel as though they were a UN summit and that an uncertain peace was being announced between the warring factions somewhere. They are incredibly portentous and oh-so-serious, with lectures, spotlighting, and agendas.
This time, there was a surprise appearance from the disgraced British TV historian David Starkey.
Starkey is on the board of Hever Castle and was present for the unveiling of the portrait but not the prayerbook. Between the two, he had commented on the murder of George Floyd, which caused him to be dropped by television and the rest of the media.
The comment was along the lines that ‘slavery was not a genocide; otherwise, there would not be so many damned blacks in America.’ It’s pretty racist, really.
Starkey tried to mitigate the comment by saying that he was using damned in a way that men of his generation said blimey or by gad or some such nonsense.
Let’s be very clear: he ain’t Bertie Wooster, Lord Peter Wimsey or even Noel Coward.
Imagine our shock to find him present at the press breakfast, followed by an hour-long expose of the recreated apartments.
In length worthy of Trump and with, at times, a similar rhetorical approach, we listened to a worrying mixture of politics, history, and self-justification delivered at breakneck speed and in no particular order.
We were told that, unlike the recent UK election, in which no facts were discussed and no takeaways for the public at large were given, the recreated apartments were based on truth and evidence.
Starkey claimed that the Reformation began in Hever and then agreed with Nigel Farage that the whole purpose of life was fighting between states for power and dominance.
He didn’t agree with Farage on everything, but he was spot on. However, due to the feminisation of history, we did not understand that women had great power in the Tudor era.
The room went silent, apart from a lot of shuffling in the polypropylene chairs. No one wanted to agree with Starkey, but we all wanted this haranguing to stop.
It is funny how people revert to type when confronted with such an angry, overwhelming, assertive and opinionated man. We did not engage with him.
No questions were asked, and none were asked for. We just wanted it to be over.
Starkey’s Anne Boleyn had cold black diamond eyes that flashed orders to the lovesick monarch. Her sister Mary had been Henry’s mistress but within the context of a marriage to a complaisant husband.
Anne was a force to be reckoned with in the bedroom, reducing Henry VIII to a sweaty adolescent who filled his love letters to her with hearts of their initials and kisses.
We were also told that on 1st January 1527, right there, in the best bedchamber above us, Catherine of Aragon and Henry decided on their divorce and the necessary exit from the Church of Rome.
As my former schoolmate, Anjelica, told her beau, Jack Nicholson, in her father’s film Prizzi’s Honor, maybe Anne said, “Let’s do it now on the Oriental.” One can only dream.
The poor curator then suggested that we venture towards the newly appointed apartment, with Starkey informing us yet again that had Anne Boleyn materialised in front of us, she would have instantly recognised her home.
The recreation was based on closely examining Holbein paintings and so-called evidence.
Unfortunately, no inventory of the Hever apartments existed, so the evidence was inferred based on eight contemporary inventories, which worked out what most people would have had for furniture and chattels.
We followed Starkey to the apartments in the main castle, past the room devoted to Churchill and the portraits of the royals who had visited Hever when the Astors lived there.
The first room was not a Victorian Parlour. The floor had sisal matting that looked like the best on offer from Peter Jones but was supposedly woven from contemporary Tudor remnants.
The walls had 6th-form art project block-printed hangings, which were less expensive than the woven damask kind we would see upstairs.
Small carpets on the window sills still had their price tags from the local antique dealers, who had lent or sold them to the castle. £550 and £750 seemed a lot for not terribly good-quality early 20th-century rugs.
On the table was a collection of pewter tankards and salvers with a 100% plastic cottage loaf slab. In every room, there was a linen hanging with a helpful note about what it was used for. All things that would most certainly be familiar to Anne.
I have it on good authority that she liked nothing better than a plastic loaf and a stainless steel tankard of ale before she took the price tags off her rugs.
The next room was the nursery, which was sometimes referred to as “Anne’s Bedroom.” It had striped red and green wall hangings, a big bed with a photostat of a bedspread, and toys in a crib that looked more like a coffin for the children who supposedly haunted the rather barren room.
From there, we entered the grandest room, the Great Chamber. Anne Boleyn would not have recognised this room because the castle might have collapsed into a heap if they had demolished an offending later wall. However, there was a newly painted frieze with Tudor roses and heraldic beasts around the walls.
Teal damask fabrics hung alongside the linen information panels, and a few paintings, including one of Erasmus, who was there because he knew Anne’s father, were on display.
One brave soul asked if the furniture was authentic Tudor, only to be told most of it was not. The room was cluttered with more cheap pewter and strangely flower arrangements in Ikea pottery vases.
It reminded me of the late Oliver Messel, who designed the 20th-century Fox meets the Tudors restaurant at the Dorchester Hotel in London, but without the postwar charm.
The last room was the Best Bedroom—again, a tad Victorian, but by that stage, we were losing all sense of being in Kansas and knew we were in a watered-down version of Disneyland on the Thames.
This was the room where great love had been declared—dared we hope that the aforementioned oriental rug was here with or without a price tag? That it was here where the dirty deed had been done and the great love had been consummated?
The walls were hung with tapestries – well, photostats of tapestries. A reproduction of a Holbein drawing of Anne Boleyn was on an easel, showing her “most unfortunate goitre” for the first time, according to Starkey. It was at this point that I lost it.
The four-poster bed had a bedside table, which seemed a little Edwardian. What, no Teasmaid, a glass for the false teeth and somewhere to put the Agatha Christie?
In fact, there was a “letter writing station” on which the King’s love letters were piled high and stained with tears and sweat, and one can only imagine what else.
There was also a casket full of treasure – well, the best pearls and gilt chains one can get from Primark with the now oh so familiar B for Boleyn – or was it for Best Bedroom – threaded on one.
It was hardly ghetto fabulous, though it occurred to me that Fergie wore a similar S on a pearl choker on her wedding day to the non-sweathery relative of Henry.
Hidden behind a fake tapestry was a linen-panel door leading to a 1980s flamingo pink bathroom suite with a capacious bidet and a state-of-the-art heated towel rack.
Were the towels monogrammed AB for Lady Anne and HR for Henricus Rex?
During the tour, Starkey spent an inordinate amount of time telling us to move on quickly and listen to him. Some did, some did not, and some creased up with laughter at the utter absurdity of it all. It was a Hyacinth Bouquet version of Tudorbethan times.
We were anticipating the ante-macassors and the revolving bookcases full of Barbara Cartland and Dick Francis. Nearby was the King’s bedchamber with a delightful Constance Spry floral arrangement and two waxworks of Henry and Anne.
Between them was a bed with 100% polyester white fur thrown on it that reminded me of the saying it is fun to sin with Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin, though, in this case, it would be it is fun to sin with Anne Boleyn on a polar bear skin.
Hever is a lovely castle with spectacular grounds, perfect for a day out. It does not need this sub-Disney/Tussauds content—nowhere does.
Another childhood obsession of mine was Jane Austen, and it continues to be so. My Pride and Prejudice was not the Colin Firth wet shirt one but the Laurence Olivier film. Of course, I did watch the 1995 Colin Firth version.
I am afraid that Laurence Olivier remains my ideal Darcy with all the delicious anachronisms that Hollywood could supply in the 1940s, but Colin Firth is a tremendously fine actor.
Recently, in London at the Jermyn Street Theatre, Adrian Lukis, who played the wicked and scandalous Mr Wickham in the Firth version, reprised his role for nearly thirty years in Being Mr Wickham, directed by Guy Unsworth.
From nasty twenty-year-old scoundrel to sixty-year-old roue, it did seem incredible that an actor should feel the need to cling onto the trappings of his youth and preserve the character he was famed for playing decades ago.
After he played George Wickham, Adrian Lukis played another George – the evil cad George Vavasor in a radio adaptation of The Pallisers. George is a good name for a cad throughout the ages.
I remember being confused and excited when I met my parents’ Cambridge contemporary Gary Watson, who played the same role in the magnificent BBC series of Anthony Trollope’s political novels.
In our drawing room at home, gladly accepting a fistful of Twiglets from my outstretched chubby hand, was the real-life George Vavasor, who tried to cheat his cousin out of her property and propriety.
The temptation to throw burgundy into his face was too great. It was both unsettling and thrilling to be faced at an impressionable age by a real-life scoundrel—even if he was only the actor playing him, who, by the way, seemed perfectly pleasant.
No one likes Mr Wickham – he is the ultimate baddie who not only almost seduces Darcy’s sister Georgiana but also, and this time more successfully, the vivacious and unbearable Lydia Bennet.
They elope, and although Lydia is fifteen, they have an ardent, passionate coupling above an inn somewhere in far-flung London. Darcy makes Wickham an offer he cannot refuse, and they marry much to the relief and reputation of all concerned.
He is the conduit to expressing true love between Darcy and Elizabeth. He shows Elizabeth that Darcy is not proud and Darcy that she is not prejudiced.
Adrian Lukis wrote the play with Catherine Curzon. Turning 60 himself, he wondered how Wickham would deal with that milestone. For Lukis, it is a story about getting old and what ageing disgracefully actually means.
The Jermyn St Theatre set is a rather small bijoux study with a decanter of brandy, a crystal goblet and a leather armchair. We were told that Lydia is sleeping in the next-door room after yet another marital dispute.
One was left with the impression that the marriage had been rocky and tempestuous but that they stayed together because they were too lazy to do anything else, even if their coupling was less passionate.
Lukis believes he has not whitewashed George Wickham but made him more human and perhaps a little less appalling. He is a feckless, threadbare charmer with not much to recommend except some cooped-up energy and restlessness.
Wickham’s idol was Lord Byron—another George—“who was ‘brash, boorish and rash”. He might have been a war hero at Waterloo but preferred gossiping about Byron’s affairs and Hector Berlioz’s falling for Harriet Wilson.
What worked in the play is the universal truth that however old they become, most men still believe they are that teenage Adonis and have a fantasy about not being trapped or constrained by a partner. They avoid commitment and the day-to-day for a fantasy of libertinage and never paying the bill.
Stand up, George Wickham, and embrace the post-menopausal male in all his glory. He might need Viagra and reek of embrocation, but as Starkey would say by Gad, there is life in the old dog yet…
Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James was yet another version of what happened to George Wickham after the Austen novel ends. On trial for a murder he did not commit, Wickham is again helped by Darcy, who manages to ship him off to the United States, where no doubt he sired some ancestor of Trump or JD Vance.
In this Pride and Prejudice spin-off, Wickham was played by Matthew Goode, who is in my third and possibly most bizarre of all F for Fake experiences of July 2024.
Freud’s Last Session is a film based on a two-hander play by Mark St Germain and directed by Matthew Brown. The play and movie are based on a note in Freud’s appointments diary – meeting with young Oxford Don. No one knows if it ever occurred or who the don was. Male or female? Scientist or classicist?
In Freud’s Last Session, CS Lewis of Narnia fame meets with Freud, who is both intrigued and irritated by his belief in the divine. Goode plays Lewis, and Freud is played by Anthony Hopkins, who played a post-war Lewis in the 1993 film Shadowlands.
This is the most unsettling fake of all. The Anne Boleyn apartment was just high comedy, and the Austen spin-off followed a well-trod tradition, but this film was a huge worry. It is a bit like people who watch The Crown with the belief that it is history writ large.
The setting is right; it was the week before Freud’s semi-suicide, and London was at war, but everything else was not.
True: Freud did have mouth cancer and a bad-tempered chow dog. Lewis did live with the mother of his WWI late friend. She may well have been more than a mother substitute to him and his brother.
Freud did die of too much morphine administered by a fellow Viennese refugee in London. But they never actually met, and the somewhat laboured discussion between them about the existence of God never actually happened.
Lewis was a firm Anglican, and Freud was a secular Jew. Did his last week on earth make him consider matters spiritual in a new light?
To beef up Freud’s Last Session, there is a secondary story about Freud not accepting his daughter’s close relationship with Dorothy, a married American heiress.
The film features them canoodling under the chintz eiderdown, but again, did this happen?
Anna Freud always said that they were close friends but denied anything more. This may or may not have been true, but did Freud suspect, know, or disapprove?
In another scene, a much older Jeremy Northam plays Freud’s disciple, Ernest Jones, who meets Lewis and again asks for Anna’s hand in marriage. That did happen, but in Vienna a few decades earlier.
Anna is played by a German actress who speaks English with a heavy German accent. Hopkins maintains his Welsh burr throughout but throws in the odd cod German phrase like Gott in Himmel – German spoken by Morecambe and Wise when all is said and done.
Such films are extremely dangerous because the fake, as does the dodgy premise, becomes accepted.
I discussed Freud’s Last Session and Shadowlands with friends of my parents who had known Lewis in his final years as a don at Oxford. They said that both films missed Lewis’s sheer brilliance.
CS Lewis was blessed with a razor-sharp wit and was extraordinarily funny. He would have you collapsed on the floor in hysterics, and of course, he was unbelievably well-informed.
Neither Goode nor Hopkin’s Lewis had anything like this in their performances.
Their Anglican fantasy writer was a tweedy young or older man in a trilby and Gabardine Mac sporting a gas mask and a well-used pipe. It never showed the fun behind the mask.
Hopkins’ Freud was also a slimline version of the real Freud – watered down for the guys in the back row, but unlike Hannibal Lecter, he did exist – at least if we disbelieve that monumental orange fake Donald J Trump.
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Photograph courtesy of Antonio Acuña. Published under a Creative Commons license.