J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

J D Davies

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 1

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In recent posts, I’ve looked at the lives of some of the real ‘gentleman captains’ who became models for my fictional character, Matthew Quinton. Drawn from the aristocracy and gentry, often possessing very little prior experience of the sea, the ‘gentlemen’ became increasingly dominant in the navy of Charles II and Samuel Pepys. By doing so, they gradually restricted the opportunities for ‘tarpaulins’ to rise to command – men like Matthew’s friend Kit Farrell, professional seamen who had either worked their way up through warrant officer posts or had come in from the merchant service. (These career paths often overlapped; like the seamen themselves, ‘tarpaulins’ frequently moved between naval and merchant ships during the course of their careers.) In this and the next couple of posts, I’ll outline the careers of a few tarpaulin officers who provided inspiration for the character of Kit.

Sir John Berry, c.1636-90 – Berry’s background was respectable; he was the son of a Devon vicar. But his father was removed from his living for Anglican and royalist tendencies, so the family fell into poverty and John and his brothers had to seek a living as best they could. He served in merchant ships before moving into the navy after the Restoration. By 1663 he was boatswain of the Swallow Ketch in the Caribbean, and when the command fell vacant, Berry was appointed to it by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford, a fellow Devonian who was related to George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, the architect of the Restoration and joint admiral of the fleet in 1666. These connections benefited Berry when he returned to England in the latter year; Albemarle gave him several commands, and in 1667 he went back to the Caribbean as captain of the hired ship Coronation, commanding the squadron which won the Battle of Nevis against the French in May 1667. This success cemented Berry’s reputation. He held several important commands before the outbreak of the third Anglo-Dutch war; when that began he was given command of the Third Rate Resolution, earning his knighthood for his defence of the Duke of York’s flagship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672), and he also served in all three major battles in 1673. In 1676-7 he went to Virginia in command of the Bristol, leading the naval forces assigned to put down ‘Bacon’s rebellion’. So respected was Berry that in 1680-1 King Charles II entrusted him with the naval training of his illegitimate son the Duke of Grafton during a Mediterranean cruise aboard the frigate Leopard.

In 1682 he was given command of the Gloucester, carrying the Duke of York to Scotland, but the ship was wrecked off the Norfolk coast. No blame attached to Berry; quite the opposite, as it was probably only his efforts that saved the heir to the throne’s life. In 1683 he went to Tangier as vice-admiral of the fleet tasked with evacuating the expensive English colony. During the voyage he befriended Samuel Pepys, a relationship that paid dividends in 1686 when Berry was appointed to Pepys’s special commission for rebuilding the navy. In 1688 Berry became rear-admiral of the fleet entrusted with defending against William of Orange’s invasion, but he was staunchly anti-French and anti-Catholic, becoming an active Williamite conspirator and even got involved in a plot to kidnap the admiral, Lord Dartmouth. Berry’s health deteriorated markedly through 1689 and he died on 14 February 1690, being buried at Stepney church.

Berry did very well out of his naval service: at his death he owned a house in Mile End and other property in Middlesex and Kent. Perhaps his greatest failing was a tendency toward immodesty. He was an outstanding seaman, greatly respected by the men, and he lost no opportunity to trumpet his own competence and popularity. Ultimately, though, his career had owed much to those two vital factors for the success of any 17th century naval officer: luck and good connections.

History and Fiction

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I thought I’d take a brief break from my accounts of ‘the real gentlemen captains’ to give my impressions of last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, Novel Approaches: From Academic History to Historical Fiction, which continues this week in virtual form. First of all it was great fun, and it was good to meet and to listen to other people with similar enthusiasms to my own – although it was somewhat disconcerting to enter the hall and discover that roughly 80-90% of the delegates were female (one of them asked me at lunchtime if I was feeling outnumbered, which I definitely was!). It was particularly interesting to hear from others with a similar background to my own, i.e. people who started out as academic historians and then crossed over to write historical fiction, notably Alison Weir and Ian Mortimer. There was much discussion of the need to be ‘authentic’, but not entire agreement on what’s meant by ‘authenticity’; some authors clearly go to enormous lengths to ensure that there are no factual anachronisms in their work and that they comply entirely with the known historical record, while others (such as Mortimer, when writing fiction under his alias James Forrester) prefer to be ‘authentic’ in a broader way, to the sense and atmosphere of the period. I’m firmly in the latter camp, but this might be because authors like Mortimer and myself, who have been steeped in academic research on our periods for well over twenty years, possibly have a more instinctive feel for that atmosphere (and for the language of the time, etc) than someone researching a period from scratch, who might be more anxious to avoid making even minor factual errors, to alter the chronology, or to take liberties – up to a point – with the known life stories of real people. From an entertainment viewpoint, undoubtedly the highlight of the conference for me was the contribution by the literary agent Peter Straus, who emphasised the continuing primacy of word of mouth as the best means of promoting a book, the importance of luck (notably lacking in the case of the US edition of The Instance of the Fingerpost, published in the week that Diana died), the notion of the Booker Prize-winning formula (‘myth, love and history’, a la A S Byatt) and the lack of omniscience of publishers; hence the horrified initial reaction of the sales and marketing department to C J Sansum’s stunningly successful Shardlake series, namely ‘hunchbacks don’t sell’ (presumably forgetting what Shakespeare did with Richard III).

However, I think the main thing I took away from the conference was the increased acceptance from all parties that academic history and historical fiction aren’t two sides of a great divide, but are both staging posts in a spectrum – and both, indeed, are simplifications to a greater or lesser degree. Academic history used to like to see itself as a disinterested pursuit of truth; as Simon Schama put it, historians are ‘party poopers’, demolishing the widely accepted myths that the public is comfortable with. (Perhaps therefore historical novelists are ‘party animals’, perpetuating the myths – e.g. Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker with ‘mud, blood and donkeys’ in World War I – and dealing with those things that historians dare not touch because they lie beyond the boundaries of the sources, such as people’s emotions, such big issues as loyalties and beliefs, and the ‘what ifs’ of history). However, as several speakers stressed, academic history itself is increasingly seen as a fictive concept: historians select and interpret their material with greater or lesser degrees of subjectivity, while even ‘primary sources’ aren’t the beginning of a process but the end of one. They are the recording of an event that has already taken place, and are thus themselves subject to selection and subjectivity, rather like modern TV or newspaper reporting; or as Arthur Marwick used to put it, ‘history’ is actually the artificial construct, the prism, through which we study the totality which was ‘the past’, only a minute fraction of which we can ever recreate. I think this realisation that history and fiction aren’t really so far apart after all reflects the fact that academic history, once remarkably hierarchical and even snobbish, has become rather more tolerant and inclusive in the last 15-20 years or so. When I started work on my doctorate in the early 1980s there was a definite ‘pecking order’, with political and religious history at the top – the former, for my period, dominated by such titans as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and Hugh Trevor-Roper, all of whom I encountered at once time or another. (In Trevor-Roper’s case, this involved knocking him off his bike when rushing to his lecture; as far as I know, the trauma he might have suffered from my carelessness has never been advanced as a possible cause of his subsequent faux pas in authenticating the Hitler diaries.) Economic history was tolerated, social history was mainstream thanks to the likes of Hobsbawm and Thompson but was still not entirely respectable, while naval history was regarded very much as an unfashionable and insignificant backwater (although then probably still more ‘mainstream’ than gender and race history, etc).

Thus I was something of an exotic beast at Oxford historical seminars in the mid-1980s, although the tide was already turning. Indeed, the very fact that I was taken on as a DPhil student by Gerald Aylmer, one of the most eminent political historians of the day, has been used in a recent study of the progress of naval history as proof that things were changing. Now there is a chair in naval history at King’s College, London; a naval historian holds a fellowship of All Souls; Cambridge runs a maritime history workshop; and the numbers of those studying naval history at such institutions as King’s, Greenwich and Exeter probably run into hundreds. So maybe I’ll live to see a professorship in historical fiction at Oxford, but perhaps we’ll only be certain that all the barriers really have come down when David Starkey writes a sex-filled Tudor bodice ripper (ideally with a black protagonist) or Niall Ferguson succeeds Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver as the author of the next Bond novel, in which Q gives Bond six really ‘killer apps’. But I won’t hold my breath.

Rules of Succession

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There’s been much spluttering about the announcement of a change to the royal rules of succession, both to allow elder girls to succeed before younger brothers and to end the prohibition on marriage to Catholics. Indeed, it’s been one of those rare cases of equally loud and indignant spluttering from both left and right – the former keen to be rid of the whole circus, the latter outraged at yet more constitutional tinkering (and in the more extreme bunkers of Protestant fundamentalism, opposed to any sign of compromise with what some of them still see as the Romish Whore of Babylon). As usual when a piece of real, complicated history gets into the press, some of the coverage has been simply woeful. For example, I’ve seen plenty of suggestions that our current procedures are all to do with Henry VIII, presumably because he’s the only monarch whom most journalists and members of the public know anything about (if only thanks to the eye-watering inaccuracies and bodice-ripping of The Tudors). In fact, of course, every monarch who wed between Henry’s reign and 1689 was married to at least one Catholic (although admittedly James VI & I’s spouse only converted after marriage), and the tradition of male primacy in succession to the throne went back at least to the civil war between Stephen and Matilda. Then we’ve had the shock horror brigade who’ve trawled back and discovered that if these rules had existed in 1901, the Kaiser would have become King! Gosh, how dreadful; and if I’d been born in 1901, I’d have been my own grandfather. Fewer pundits have gone further back and realised that if the new rules had existed in the past, neither Henry VIII or Charles I would have become King …and even fewer have realised that neither would George III. Would the American colonies have been quite so animated against ‘Her Majesty Queen Augusta I’, 1760-1813, George’s elder sister? I wonder.

Out of personal interest, I once did quite a lot of work on what seemed to me to be a completely neglected ‘succession crisis’ in British history, namely that of the period 1667-72. This was intended to form part of a book which now seems very unlikely ever to see the light of day, so I’m happy to put it into the public domain. If anybody’s particularly interested, get in touch and I can send you a version with footnotes! Here goes…

King Charles II celebrated his fortieth birthday on 29 May 1670, amid the bonfires, bells, salutes and secretive politicking that dominated the visit to Dover of his sister ‘Madame’, Henrietta, duchesse d’Orleans, sister-in-law of King Louis XIV; a visit that culminated in the notorious treaty by which Charles agreed publicly to announce his conversion to Catholicism prior to embarking on an Anglo-French war against the Netherlands. Even without the astonishing political and religious context that surrounded the birthday celebrations, such landmarks are traditionally supposed to encourage ruminations on mortality; and even if Charles’s thoughts had not already turned that way, the shattering news of Madame’s sudden death, which reached the English court in the morning of 22 June, certainly must have done. The loss of Henrietta at the age of only twenty-six, so soon after the joyful family reunion, devastated the king, who took to his bed. But it also threw into sharp relief the potential succession crisis that seemed to lie ahead of the Stuarts. Charles was already, and by some margin, the oldest crowned head of a large European kingdom, having acquired that distinction when his second cousin Frederick III of Denmark-Norway died in February. Louis XIV was thirty-two, the Emperor Leopold thirty, Carlos el Hechtizado, ‘the Bewitched’ – the appallingly disabled King of Spain – only nine; leaving aside a few German or Italian princes of lesser rank, the only monarch anywhere in Europe who was older than Charles was Alexis, Tsar of all the Russias, and he only by fourteen months. Indeed, some of the uncertainties and policy switchbacks in European politics in the period 1667-72 might be explained by the fact that all of the large western powers, with the notable exception of France, had a real or potential ‘succession crisis’ at the time; in addition to the situations in Britain and Spain, until late in 1671 the Danish male line was represented only by the new King Christian V  and his brother, the future husband of Queen Anne, while the Emperor Leopold had no heir at all, and his serious illness early in 1670 threatened the Habsburg dynasty with extinction.

In Britain, he long-term survival prospects of the Stuart family appeared to be grim. Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, had suffered a miscarriage in June 1669 – somewhat surprisingly, as many courtiers had written off her prospects of bearing a child years before. During this period, too, the Duke of York’s health was worse than the king’s: he had an attack of smallpox in November 1667, and in July 1670, barely a month after Henrietta’s death, James contracted what seemed to be consumption and withdrew to Richmond, where his recovery was briefly despaired of. It turned out to be no more than a bad cold, but the fact that some pessimists exaggerated the symptoms demonstrates the intensity of the concerns for the future of the royal family. James’s two eldest sons, the Dukes of Cambridge and Kendal, had died within weeks of each other in 1667. Therefore the next in line to the throne in 1670 was little Prince Edgar, ‘the sole sprig who is at present ready to succeed to the crown of these kingdoms’, as the Venetian ambassador put it, whose name (unique in every dynasty since the conquest) probably symbolised a desire to reassert British sovereignty at sea after the humiliating Dutch attack on the Medway a few weeks before Edgar’s birth. But the survival record of James’s children was appalling, and Edgar, aged three and three-quarters, followed his elder brothers to the grave on 8 June 1671 – almost exactly two months after his mother, who died in cancerous and grossly corpulent agony. James and Anne had two daughters, Mary (aged seven in 1670) and Anne (aged five) but both were in poor health, especially Anne, and none of Charles and James’s five sisters had lived to see their thirtieth birthdays. Another daughter, Katherine, was born in February 1671, but survived only until December. The concern over the security of the line of succession was reflected in the indecent haste with which a second marriage for James was mooted almost immediately after the death of his first duchess.  But if both James and his daughters died before such a marriage came about and produced a son, and assuming that Charles II did not either legitimise his eldest bastard, the Duke of Monmouth, or divorce Catherine of Braganza and remarry – both possibilities that he had plainly ruled out – then the fate of the Stuart dynasty rested with three other branches of the family. There were the two young daughters of Henrietta, who were being brought up as Catholics at the French court and were thus likely to be unacceptable to English sensibilities (indeed, it was their descendants who formed the principal group disinherited by the soon-to-be-repealed Act of Settlement of 1701, and who provide the residual ‘Jacobite’ claim to the throne to this day). Then there were the children of Charles’ and James’ aunt, the ‘Winter Queen’ Elizabeth of Bohemia. The youngest of her children, Sophia, would eventually be nominated as heir by the 1701 Act of Settlement, and from her the present royal family – all 5,000 or so members of it – descends; but in the 1660s and 1670s the senior representative of this line, the Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig, was damned in Charles II’s eyes because of his support for Parliament and overt ambition to obtain the British crowns during the Civil Wars. The third, and by far the most important, of the potential reversionary claimants in the event of a cataclysmic failure of the dynasty was the twenty-year-old son of the Stuart brothers’ other dead sister, Mary, the Princess Royal (1631-60).

William III, Prince of Orange-Nassau, was at once the hope of many in his Dutch homeland, and potentially the saviour of the Stuart bloodline. He was by far the oldest of the surviving grandchildren of the ‘saint and martyr’ Charles I; apart from the sickly and doomed Prince Edgar, he was also that monarch’s only grandson. Moreover, while Stuarts tended to die suddenly and young, the House of Orange generally enjoyed vigorous health and longevity. William’s father was an exception, dying of smallpox at the age of twenty-four, but William III’s two aunts lived to be seventy-one and forty-six, while both his grandfather and four of that grandfather’s siblings lived well past fifty. Even in 1670, it would have been obvious to both William and his two uncles that there was a reasonably good chance of him eventually succeeding to the British thrones. William decided to visit England in the autumn of 1670. His main reason for coming over was to get Charles to pay his mother’s dowry and other debts, totalling 2,797,859 guilders, but he might also have had one eye on his reversionary interest in the British succession. In turn, his uncles may have taken the opportunity to broach to him his potential future role within the Stuart family; when William eventually arrived in England (he reached Whitehall on 1 November), many believed that he had come to find a wife. After his formal entry to the court, William was feted in the City of London, visited Oxford and Cambridge, and attended a military review in Hyde Park before returning to his homeland in February 1671. Charles at least thought of attempting to recruit William to the Anglo-French ‘grand design’, but abandoned the scheme when he found his nephew to be too Dutch and too Protestant, or so he told Louis XIV. Nevertheless, William’s attitude to his uncles, and to the growing threat to the Dutch state, was ambivalent. In January 1672 he wrote to Charles, promising to support him in ‘obtaining from the States whatever he wish’ as long as it was consistent with his loyalty to the republic; unsurprisingly, this letter has caused Dutch historians considerable angst over the years. When the war began in the spring of 1672, William emerged as the heroic defender of his fatherland, and within twenty years he was King of England and Scotland, the victor of the Boyne and the hero of Protestant Ireland. Ironically, his horse’s trip over a molehill ensured that his life was rather shorter than those of his uncles.

Ultimately, therefore, the worries over the succession during the years 1667-72 proved to be academic. Charles lived to be fifty-five, James to be sixty-eight, and both Mary and Anne lived long enough to succeed to the throne – as did William, albeit only by dint of invading England. But it’s too easy to overlook the insecurities and concerns that plagued people in the past simply because we know how things turned out. As William III’s fatal mole proved, something can always stick its head above ground and set history off on an entirely different course; and wouldn’t be deliciously ironic if after all the headlines and the law-passing, William and Kate’s first child turned out to be a boy after all?

Don’t Tell Your Mother

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Apologies for missing my usual posting date last week. I’ve been in Wales for 10 days or so, packing in a lot of research and fieldwork for my new non-fiction book Britannia’s Dragon. I’ve had intermittent internet access and also managed to forget my access codes for the blog…

Anyway, I thought I’d get back on track with a marvellous little source that I found last week in Pembrokeshire’s  county record office. This is a wonderfully old-fashioned institution housed in a converted Georgian prison, itself located within the walls of a lofty hilltop medieval castle. In this letter, written on 7 June 1743, concerned father John Thomas of Posty, Pembrokeshire, writes to his son Vaughan, who has run away to sea after a family argument and entered himself on the ship’s books of HMS Princess Amelia, lying at Plymouth. The letter demonstrates that the cross-currents of angst, guilt and emotional blackmail that underpin many family relationships are as old as the hills –

‘we are all glad to hear that you are well, your mother and sister and self lost years at the reading of your letter. We expected to hear that you designed to return homewards, your mother has been ill of the rheumatism ever since you parted…there is not a day or night but that she sheds tears about your going away, pray if possible return home…We are informed that it is like to be very troublesome both at sea and land and that several worthy men have lately lost their lives at the West Indies, we desire you to consider both of the times and of the hot season, as to what your mother and myself proposed to give as the present you may assure yourself of it if you return home and settle with us. Pray let us hear how you were received when you went first on board, and what post you have had, we thought that you had no need of going into a man of war but leave such a place to those that had most need of having a sufficiency provided as we thought for you here. We desire you to consider seriously of it, and as to your having any preferment at sea, I think you are too old and besides one that never used the sea, and as to what [differences] have been between us here, your mother and self desires it might be forgotten…’

Vaughan evidently left the navy but does not appear to have returned home, as a couple of years later he was living in Bristol. One of the things I particularly like about this letter is the way in which the father constantly tries, and fails, to conceal his own feelings about the matter, which are clearly complicated – although he shares his wife’s anxieties, his own concern for family dignity also comes through in his request to know what status Vaughan has aboard the ship. But best of all is his attempt to make the young man feel guilty by implying that the mother’s attack of rheumatism is all his fault!

I’ll compensate for the recent hiatus in the blog before the end of this week by posting a fairly epic analysis of the current debate on changing the royal succession rules, placing them in the context of the little-known succession crisis of 1667-72. More interesting than it sounds. Yes, honestly, it is. Trust me.

Stepney 200

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Last Monday, 3 October, marked the 200th anniversary of the death of a lesser known but fascinating figure of the Regency age: Sir John Stepney, Baronet, sometime ambassador to Dresden and Berlin. Stepney died at Trnava in modern-day Slovakia, and in many respects his afterlife proved as memorable as his 68 years of living. He gave instructions that he should receive what was essentially an atheist funeral, but the local authorities seem instead to have given him both a Protestant and a Catholic service. His will was dominated by two principal themes: the construction of a particularly byzantine entail, the implications of which occupied and perplexed his heirs for over a century, and the arrangements for the transportation of his pet pug Carlino back to England, through the heart of war-torn Napoleonic Europe. (The dog died on the journey, but Sir John’s valets claimed the reward specified in the will by dumping the canine corpse on the doorstep of the ex-mistress he had named as the recipient.) A fashionable ‘macaroni’ in his younger days, and eminent enough to have been painted by Reynolds, Stepney was a close friend of Charles James Fox and a part of the Prince of Wales’s circle, connections that led to his appointment as an ambassador. At Berlin he had audiences with Frederick the Great, then nearing the end of his reign, and reported Frederick’s blunt opinion that the new United States of America was far too big to last for very long and was as doomed to failure as any union of European nations would be. Opinions of his ambassadorial service were mixed. Nathaniel Wraxall, who visited him in Dresden in 1778, praised the ‘hospitality and polished manners’ of ‘one of the finest gentlemen to have been employed on missions during the present reign’, but one critic snidely attack both Stepney and his mother: ‘Sir J- S-, who saunters about the assemblies of Dresden in honour of his royal master, is a gay young man, of an elegant taste, and with an estate most heavily encumbered by a dowager, who makes life too agreeable to think of leaving it.’ (The dowager Lady Stepney had a formidable temper and an eccentric personality, perhaps best encapsulated in her decision to name her favourite dog Serpent.)

Sir John’s pleasures were principally the turf (disastrously), the card tables (ditto) and women (with mixed success). He never married, but fathered three acknowledged illegitimate sons and a fourth reputed one. His most passionate liaison was probably that with Lady Almeria Carpenter, one of the great court beauties of the 1770s; unfortunately, though, she was also notoriously dim. They were engaged to be married, but it seems likely that his seduction of her, leading to the birth of the boy who became Lieutenant-Colonel Orlando John Williams of the Newfoundland Regiment, ended the relationship. She soon took up with a far more illustrious lover, the Duke of Gloucester, the most bovine of the brothers of King George III. (Stepney got his own back in due course; he seems to have become the lover of the Duchess of Cumberland, widow of another of the brothers.)

Stepney came from an intriguing and influential family, one which bore a name that remains a byword to a quarter of the world’s population: in the Indian sub-continent and Brazil, a ‘Stepney’ is still the name for a vehicle’s spare tyre. The bloodline also produced George Stepney, diplomat, poet and leading member of the Kit Kat Club during Queen Anne’s reign, as well as close friends of an eclectic range of prominent figures from Gladstone and Tennyson to Karl Marx and Dylan Thomas. John’s younger brother Tom was one of the most recognisable eccentrics in London clubland and also served as a witty Blackadder-like groom of the bedchamber to the Prince Regent’s brother, the ‘grand old Duke of York’. Their parents had inhabited one of the most spectacular Georgian houses in Wales, Llanelly House – now being restored by a dynamic project team, and due to open to the public in 2013. I’ve been working on a book about the family for about 15 years now, and hope that its appearance will coincide roughly with the opening of the great house; I’ll cover other aspects of the history of the Stepneys in subsequent blogs. As part of the ongoing research for the book, I hope to be able to visit Trnava one day fairly soon and to pay my respects properly to that fascinating old rogue, Sir John Stepney.

Death and Cereals

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Sometimes one stumbles across fascinating historical stories entirely by chance. I was checking some naval references in my vast, ancient volume of the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic for 1660 (bought for a fiver many moons ago in Hay-on-Wye, when one could still find such bargains) when I noticed a mention of Biggleswade, the nearest market town to our village. With the best will in the world, Biggleswade isn’t really England’s most scintillating town, despite being the headquarters of Jordans cereals; the most famous event in its history was the Great Fire of Biggleswade in 1785, which for some reason hasn’t enjoyed quite the fame of its London equivalent. So I took particular note of the mention in CSPD, and it turned out to be a doorway into a fascinating and murky tale. In a nutshell, in August 1660 a prominent Scottish nobleman, the Master of Gray, was killed at Biggleswade by the even more prominent Earl of Southesk. It quickly became apparent that there were two competing versions of what caused Gray’s death: in one, it was a tragic accident while two friends were practising their fencing skills; in the other, it was a deliberate duel to the death. Slowly I unearthed more evidence, and the story got ever murkier. Gray had been a staunch royalist, Southesk a committed Parliamentarian, so was the killing a legacy of the civil wars? Both seem to have been in competition for the office of sheriff of Forfarshire, so was the killing a consequence of the frenetic scramble for offices following the restoration of the monarchy?

But then there were also the strange myths associated with the name of James Carnegie, second Earl of Southesk. He was said to have become such a great swordsman because he was trained by the devil, and cast no shadow because that had been the price of his Faustian bargain with Satan. It was said that after his death, the devil returned and carried his pupil away with him in his coach. Particularly intriguing from my point of view was that Southesk was meant to have been educated (both by the devil and by more earthly teachers) at the University of Padua. This rang plenty of bells, for John, third Earl of Gowrie, one of the key players in the so-called ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600 and thus central to my book Blood of Kings, had also been educated at Padua, and the accusation that he learned the black arts there was one of the key charges brought against him posthumously. Padua was perceived as a hotbed of alchemy and necromancy, principally, it seems, because of the innate suspicion of the ignorant and/or Protestant for an institution that was at the cutting edge of scientific teaching and was, of course, in a Catholic state. So was Southesk’s reputation being deliberately blackened in the way that Gowrie’s was, with the further implication that he might be a traitor just as Gowrie had been?

I don’t have the answers to all of these questions by any means, but investigating the story has been a fascinating little detour during the last year or two. I’ve now got enough material to air the story publicly; it gets its first outing at a public talk in Bedford on Wednesday 12 October. I’m looking forward to getting feedback and ideas for other lines of enquiry, both from the audience and from my online friends!