of a king "maligned by gossip, political manipulation, Victorian sentimentality and literary licence"? We mustn't be seduced by partisan history, but stay studiously humble before the evidence. Researching must be "a ceremony of reason, a rebuttal of ancestral myth, a way of looking at the past with the same rigour that we ought to apply to the present". To surrender a dispassionate search for truth to the cause of fantasy, however enjoyable or profitable, "is to court superstition and fanaticism".