Historically Happily Ever After
Happy endings in historical fiction
One downside of plotting historical fiction is that, despite all voids that you have to invent plausible and plot-worthy incidents, characters, settings, and motivations to fill,1 there are also hard historical facts that have to be left in place, because no amount of poetical license will enable you to work around them.
An agent of George Washington, sent to capture Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution, failed. There is no way to rewrite his story to make him successful and keep it historical. (And his cover story for this task had him, and his family, fleeing to the frontier afterwards, with some assistance from Washington to make a new life.)
Or a romance in the Middle East, a Bronze Age king being the love interest. There is no real way to avoid that he would have a harem, and the Song of Solomon presents an improbable conclusion.
There are sixty queens, and eighty concubines, and virgins without number. My dove, my pure one, is unique; she is the only one of her mother, she is the favorite one of her that bare her. The daughters saw her, and blessed her; yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her.
The queens and concubines are entirely dependent on the king’s favor for their future, and their children’s.
Likewise, marriages, children, and deaths -- including remarriages after deaths -- are fixed for many figures of royalty and nobility.
True, one can do lesser figures, even adding imaginary ones. But royalty and nobility -- besides all the appeal of wealth and position -- have far more ability to affect their lives. And their position did help to cut down on the unpleasant effects of history.2
One common solution for this is to stop early.
If you write a tale of Robin Hood and put the tale, as it has been put from the sixteenth century, in the reign of King Richard the Lion-Hearted (from being in the reign of an unspecified “King Edward”), you can end your tale with Robin being reconciled with the king and entering his service. You can even make your tale about his clashing with Prince John and helping ensure that Richard’s ransom is raised and delivered, as has been done from the twentieth century.
What you can’t help is that many readers know enough history to realize that Richard will die without an heir, leaving Robin exposed to Prince John’s ire, or at least without a royal protector.
Likewise, if you are retelling the tale of the Man in the Iron Mask, and sticking to the notion that he was Louis XIV’s identical twin, you can give whichever one is the hero a love interest. Perhaps Maria Theresa of Spain, his wife. But if you do that, your readers may remember that later, she was deeply humiliated by his mistresses.
One retelling had the Man be the older twin, the rightful heir, so a conspiracy took him from the mask and had him replace his crowned and incompetent younger twin, who was pursuing Louise de La Vallière. She repulsed him and fell in love with the older twin after meeting him before the replacement. The queen indicates that she is aware of the replacement but will say nothing as long as the twin does not share her bed or disinherit her children, and looks tolerantly on the affair with Louise.
Leaving aside the poetic license of the romance -- Louise in fact did not resist Louis’s attentions, for instance, among many other things on top of the whole Man in the Iron Mask -- your readers may remember how deeply Louise was humiliated when Louis cast her aside for another mistress but, since the new mistress was a married woman, kept Louise about to provide cover for this new affair.
History is full of problems like that, though seldom that convoluted, but it’s like having a sequel that undermines the happy ending of your story, and one that the readers read first.
A royal couple rejoices over their beautiful and healthy firstborn son, and the reader knows they will have seven sons, only the youngest of which will reach the age of five.
A king triumphantly unites a kingdom, and the reader knows that his sons will tear it apart.
A lowly knight and his bride take a position within the War of the Roses that win them quiet on his estate, but the reader realizes that the shifts of the war will mean future trouble for them.
Writers who manage to artfully select things so that they work out can be astonishing, though I do note they tend to have plausible but not actually historical characters in historical settings.
Other times, well, a helping of suspension of disbelief helps.
Taking this to its conclusion basically requires you to embrace Whig history.
In a sense the "the sequel can't undermine the happy ending" rule amounts to forcing Whig history on your fictional universe.
It seems like one way to get around this is to use an original character in the historical setting. You can have them and their loved one(s) get away to somewhere a little safer before everything goes to pot back home.