Anyone with a basic pub-quiz grasp of English history will already know where, when and how King & Conqueror ends, given that it’s a drama leading up to the Norman Conquest. That would be Hastings, October 14, 1066, and a fatal arrow in the eye of Harold, the last crowned Anglo-Saxon King of England, vanquished by William the Conqueror.
But what King & Conqueror’s eight episodes also dramatise, with their broad interpretations of two decades leading up to that landmark year, is how Harold and William’s paths crossed before. How they fought alongside each other and how their respective family ties and their spouses steered their actions to set their fates.
The show isn’t just about the last successful invasion of England, but the conclusion to a labyrinthine, well, game of thrones, after the Danish conquest earlier in the 11th century by King Cnut – always an amusing name for those pub quizzes – who was also known as King Canute.
That led, eventually, to the ascension of the Norman, Edward the Confessor, here played by Eddie Marsan with Juliet Stevenson as his mother, Emma of Normandy. After his demise came the coronation of King Harold II – despite William’s familial claim to the crown, which he made good on at Hastings, thus changing the course of English history for the next millennium.
The BBC series is a joint venture with CBS in the US, where it is screening on Prime Video. The American studio reportedly insisted that Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau play the victorious William ahead of English actor James Norton, who was originally set to take the role. Instead, Norton, having started developing the series with writer Michael Robert Johnson almost a decade ago, portrays Harold.
The Norman Conquest hasn’t figured much on screen before. Shakespeare didn’t touch it. Even though the French won, there hasn’t been much interest from across the channel, either, although France has held on to the period’s greatest visual record, the English-made Bayeux Tapestry, for centuries.
The new show arrives before the tapestry goes on display at the British Museum next year.
The problem with dramatising such a knotty period is that much of the history is still up for grabs – even the arrow to the eye, as stitched into the tapestry, is much disputed. The eighth and final episode offers its own creative take on the supposed mortal wounding.
The show is already getting plenty of “it didn’t happen like that” assessments from historians and UK TV critics, with carping about the colour-blind casting, architectural details, the darkness of the Dark Ages and it not looking much like the south of England. That’s due to it being filmed in Iceland, mostly by local directors including Baltasar Kormákur (Everest).
English screenwriter Johnson, whose previous credits include the 2009 Guy Ritchie take on Sherlock Holmes and the 2014 movie Pompeii, found balancing the conflicting history and the demands of television a challenge.
“They’re all kind of contradictory, but it was a question of reading enough to work out what the interesting truths of the story were, the ones that people agreed on, and how that could be moulded into a story, because you can’t tell a straight documentary version,” he says in BBC press notes on the series. “You can’t just dramatise the facts because the peaks and troughs of the emotions are never in the right place.
“To me, the most important thing is what do the audience get out of this? We’re asking them to invest eight hours of their lives, so how do we give them the best piece of entertainment we can from this incredible true story? And the second part of the research was trying to read as much about how the world would have been and get a good idea of what existed and what didn’t.”
Well, even the tapestry, created a decade or so after 1066, had its continuity problems – William’s moustache, a very 1970s version of which Coster-Waldau sports in the show, is its own Where’s Wally’s Mo? Harold has one, which makes him look a bit like a tall Asterix in the cloth, but Norton remains clean-shaven in the series.
Coronation scenes here have clearly used the tapestry as a reference point.
The series has also made a long chess game out of the two figures, with an eventual clash of kings, neither of them a good guy nor a villain.
Both lead actors have been a bit of both in their respective careers. In GoT, Coster-Waldau played the incest-enthused but sometimes decent Jaime Lannister. Norton has gone from a detective vicar in Grantchester to chilling psychopath Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley.
In this series, Norton’s Harold is the more interesting, more conflicted role with a steeper character arc. Norton also had a tougher time on set, reportedly breaking a collar bone after falling off a horse during rehearsals, though Coster-Waldau took on directing duties for one episode.
It’s also the story of two couples who were related by marriage – Harold and his common-law first wife Edith the Fair, played by Emily Beecham (The Pursuit of Love), and William and Matilda of Flanders, played by Clémence Poésy (The Tunnel).
Says Poésy: “The fact that these women were there at the time behind these great men ‒ it’s the curiosity of trying to figure out who they were when they’re forgotten because the men have stayed in the history books.
“It’s very hard to figure out what the truth was, but we took the suggestion of Matilda as the more political side, and William as the warrior and conqueror.”
Beecham: “The information on Edith was a bit limited and contradictory. Edith the Fair, Edith Swan-Neck, there are various names for her. Who was Edith to Harold was what I had to figure out.”
After the new Netflix political thriller Hostage, King & Conqueror is the second show this year about a rough patch in Anglo-French relations, especially given William’s ensuing harsh rule.
Norton says he encountered French President Emmanuel Macron at the British Museum for a Bayeux Tapestry event.
“I was very quick to reassure him that we had told the French story, the Norman story, with as little bias as possible. There are a lot of stories about William post the Battle of Hastings itself, and how he acted pretty monstrously … “.
“We didn’t want one hero or one villain, we wanted the audience to be split and we wanted people to sit on the sofa and have someone on Team Harold and someone on Team William.“I said to Macron: ‘I promise you that we have been fair in depicting both sides of the story’.”
King & Conqueror is now streaming on Neon with new episodes weekly. It screens on Sky’s Vibe channel from Tuesday, September 16, 9.30pm.