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J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

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About J D Davies

 

Hello! I’m J D Davies, or else just David. I write both fiction and non-fiction, primarily with a naval focus and usually set in the ‘early modern’ period, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. My new trilogy, ‘Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal’, published by Canelo, is set in the Tudor era, following the fortunes of one seafaring family from the Mary Rose to the Spanish Armada. As England looks outward towards new oceans and new worlds, the Stannard family battles against relentless enemies, foreign and domestic, while also struggling to come to terms with the switchback religious changes of the sixteenth century. All the while, though, their greatest enemy of all is the relentless force that, day by day, attacks their home town of Dunwich – the sea itself.

My bestselling naval historical fiction series ‘The Journals of Matthew Quinton’, with eight titles published to date, is set in the seventeenth century. This is a little known but hugely important period in naval history: it saw some of the largest battles of the sailing age, the beginnings of a professional navy, the evolution of the ‘line of battle’ and a number of dramatic historical events, such as the Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London and the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667, debatably the greatest defeat in British history. It was the age of Charles II, of Samuel Pepys, of Isaac Newton – and of my fictional hero, Matthew Quinton, a young man suddenly given command of a warship despite knowing nothing whatsoever about the sea. His story is founded on the very real experiences of those who found themselves in exactly that position – the ‘gentlemen captains’ of the Restoration age. The Quinton books have been highly acclaimed, with The Times describing them as ‘a series of real panache’ while Conn Iggulden wrote ‘Hornblower, Aubrey, Quinton – a pantheon of the best adventures at sea’.

My award-winning non-fiction work has mainly been set within the same period of history. Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy won the Society for Nautical Research’s Anderson Prize for 2017, and was also awarded a Certificate of Merit for the Maritime Foundation’s Mountbatten Prize in the same year. My survey of the late seventeenth century navy, Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89, won the Pepys Prize for 2009. I branched out to write my first non-naval book, Blood of Kings: The Stuarts, The Ruthvens and the Gowrie Conspiracy, published in 2010, while Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales was published by The History Press in 2013, and was subsequently shortlisted for the Mountbatten Prize. I’m the Chair of the Society for Nautical Research, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society for Nautical Research, and a former chairman of the Naval Dockyards Society.

You’ll find my more detailed biography here, and you can read an interview with me in Quarterdeck magazine here. You can also hear me talking about historical fiction and non-fiction here, in company with some friends from my local author group. I blog on this site on most weeks – you can find the latest posts if you scroll down on this page, and you can search earlier posts using the boxes at the very bottom. You can order my books from my Amazon author page, or in the case of the featured books on this page, directly via the links provided (I’ll soon extend this facility to all my other titles on the ‘My Books’ page). Other outlets are available, though – support your local independent bookseller!

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Newly published!

Battle’s Flood

Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal Book 2   England 1555, then 1567-8   Battle’s Flood takes forward the story of the central character from Destiny’s Tide, Jack Stannard, an ambitious shipowner and sea-captain from the ancient, decayed port of Dunwich, ‘England’s Atlantis’. A prologue, set ten years after the events of Destiny’s Tide during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, reintroduces us to his headstrong daughter Meg, now grown to adulthood, and sees Jack have a strange encounter with one of the most sinister pillars of Imperial Spain’s ‘black legend’. Fast forward another…

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Prize winning

Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy

By J D Davies

Winner of the Anderson Prize for 2017, and of a Certificate of Merit for the Mountbatten Prize It has always been widely accepted that the Stuart kings, Charles II and James II, had an interest in the navy and more generally in the sea. Their enthusiastic delight in sailing, for instance, is often cited as marking the establishment of yachting in England. The major naval developments in their reigns on the other hand – developments that effectively turned the Royal Navy into a permanent, professional fighting force for the first time – have traditionally been attributed to Samuel…

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Gentleman Captain

By J D Davies

The Journals of Matthew Quinton, Book 1 The British Isles,1662 Cromwell is dead. King Charles II has been restored to the throne, but his grip in power is uncertain. He needs the loyalty of his navy - but many of the officers and men were once loyal to the Commonwealth. So the king starts giving commands of warships to young cavaliers with little or no experience at sea...men like Matthew Quinton. Having wrecked the first ship he was given to command, he is surprised when the King gives him captaincy of the frigate Jupiter, with orders to investigate a potential rebellion in Scotland.…

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Digging for Britain

08/02/2021 By J D Davies 4 Comments

I recently watched The Dig, the Netflix film about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. This has garnered plenty of rave reviews from professional critics and on social media, and I've got nothing really to add to the comments others have already made. The acting is first rate; top marks to Ralph Fiennes for nailing the very specific rural Suffolk accent (something which I researched for the Stannard novels) rather than relying on the generic Zummercornorfolk essayed by so many actors who murder English regional accents, but Carey Mulligan is affecting as the terminally ill widow who owns the land where the dig takes place and there's also a decent turn from Lily James, whose contract must stipulate that she has to appear in every British drama series or film set between 1900 and … [Read More...] about Digging for Britain

On Tour: the Kronan

18/01/2021 By J D Davies Leave a Comment

Time to belatedly post my first blog of 2021. Once again I'm going to avoid all reference to The Thing and will instead provide some blatant escapism, which I think is what we all need. (Think of this blog as the Bridgerton of naval history, if you like.) I can't quite believe that it's coming up to the tenth anniversary of the trip I made to Sweden in February 2011 to do research for the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight, but that seems to be a perfectly valid excuse to post some of the photos I took on that trip. I divided it between Kalmar and Gothenburg, arriving at the former's tiny airport in a turboprop aircraft during a snowstorm - which has to be right up there on the Scariest Experience of Life To Date chart. Why Kalmar? Well, whenever people think of Sweden and 17th … [Read More...] about On Tour: the Kronan

Moving Swiftly On

21/12/2020 By J D Davies

Season's greetings from the Dante-esque dystopia that is England's new Covid Tier 4 (twinned with Purgatory and Niflheim; other afterlives are available), and yes, it's time for my inevitable Review of the Year. So here it is.             Enough of all that 24/7 excitement and non-stop global travel, so let's not talk any more about The Thing That Happened in The Year That Shall Not Be Mentioned Ever Again. For me, the writing highlight of 2020 was undoubtedly the publication of Armada's Wake, the third book of the 'Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal' trilogy, which I blogged about here. In many ways I was sad to say goodbye to Jack and the rest of the Stannard family, to the period and to Dunwich, the principal terrestrial setting for the … [Read More...] about Moving Swiftly On

The Joy of Shelf

25/11/2020 By J D Davies

Libraries closed...repositories inaccessible...research trips impossible. OK, let's keep things in perspective - none of this is remotely as important as people's lives and wellbeing. But there's no doubt that the pandemic has played havoc with historians' and authors' work, and I really feel for those with deadlines for theses or books and no way of completing essential research. Personally, these strictures haven't affected me too much as I'm not working on a major non-fiction project with a deadline; my book on the Stepney family, referred to previously in this blog, has been a work in progress for some 20 years so a few more months won't make too much difference. Instead, I've been writing the next Quinton novel, 'the one with pirates in it', so the research hurdles have been rather … [Read More...] about The Joy of Shelf

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