Hmm …

… Solitary Praxis: Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I by Peter Ackroyd.

In my view, the soundest reason to accept fictional renderings of real people in actual historical contexts is that it seems to have been accepted from the start as part of the territory of writing. After all, the record of events is necessarily incomplete. The drama is self-evident. One gets at that by applying that imaginative construct known as the hypothesis. And you proceed from there. Events are not impersonal, but the events themselves reveal little of the personalities involved in them. And yet it is the personal dimension of history that is crucial.