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The only certainties in life are death, taxes, and the fact that whenever naval history makes the news, somebody is going to get it calamitously wrong. That’s how it’s been here in the UK for the last week or so, where we’ve had the Prime Minister himself intervening in an argument over whether a song with naval associations should be played with or without words, or at all, during a concert without an audience. Just as well he doesn’t have anything more urgent to occupy him at the moment, really… As if that wasn’t enough, we had the curious phenomenon of a seemingly arcane article on Anglo-Saxon naval history in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, not normally a must-read for Fleet Street’s finest, hitting national headlines after gaining considerable traction across the blogosphere.

The cause of all this sound and fury? To take the article first, it had the temerity to suggest that King Alfred the Great, often trumpeted as the founder of the Royal Navy, didn’t, umm, found the Royal Navy. There were naval successes under his predecessors, the authors claim, and a proper naval organisation wasn’t actually set up until the reign of his grandson, Edgar. Now, none of this should really be terribly controversial. I know a reasonable amount about Edgar, having gone into quite a bit of detail about his reign and legacy for my essay on naval ideology, published last year, and a good case can be made for saying that he made impressive and effective use of seapower. Was he the first English monarch to do so? I don’t know, because – to deploy the time-honoured historian’s copout – it’s not my period.

But it seems to me that this little storm in a teacup demonstrates two tedious truisms. One is that historians, and people in general, are obsessed with claiming things as ‘the first’ (often, in the case of historians, in order to make their own reputations and/or rubbish those of their predecessors), and with the idea that The Thing, whatever it might be, had A Founder and began at a precise moment in history. The idea that The Thing came into being gradually, and that many people contributed to its creation, is inherently messier, more difficult, less ‘sexy’, and sells fewer books for historians and writers keen to make their names, than identifying a precise moment when something comes into existence (and if you don’t believe me, compare the first chapter of Genesis with the theory of evolution…)

The other tedious truism is that in this day and age, pretty well any issue, no matter how innocuous, can be weaponised by one side or the other in so-called ‘culture wars’. For example, Alfred the Great has been appropriated as an icon of English nationalism; the boat sent out by Britain First to turn back migrants trying to cross the English Channel has been rechristened to bear his name. The very fact that he is the only English monarch to be awarded the soubriquet of ‘the great’ at once puts him on a pedestal, even though it can be attributed largely to the fact that he had a far superior propaganda machine to most of his predecessors or successors. So any suggestion that Alfred wasn’t, perhaps, quite as great as hazy memories of school history lessons fifty or sixty years ago might suggest is bound to trigger an avalanche of angry messages to newspaper comments sections. It’s depressing, demonstrating yet again that people often prefer myths or downright untruths to actual historical facts, an issue I also encountered with my new novel Armada’s Wake; I talk about this problem in the new issue of the Historical Writers’ Association’s splendid journal Historia.

And so to Rule Britannia, the famous naval anthem traditionally sung at that great British institution the Last Night of the Proms. This year, though, the vastly scaled down, audience-free format of the occasion, together with the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, led to suggestions that Rule Britannia and that other tub-thumping ditty, Land of Hope and Glory, might be inappropriate and perhaps should be dropped. Cue outrage, including the aforementioned intervention by the Prime Minister, but once again, much of the outrage on both sides consisted of frankly ludicrous posturing based on shaky or non-existent historical foundations. So: yes, Rule Britannia contains the word ‘slaves’ in one of its most famous lines, ‘Britons never will be slaves’. But it’s a racing certainty that not one single person who heard it at its first performance, at Cliveden House in 1740, would have associated the word with African slavery. Written at a time of war with France, the line expresses fear of conquest by Catholic, authoritarian France, and the reduction of the British to slaves after the example of the Roman Empire – a context which would have been entirely familiar to Georgian gentlemen (and, yes, ladies) whose education had been dominated by the Classics.

(Incidentally, I’ll lay odds that I’m probably the only person who’s written about this subject who has heard the whole of Thomas Arne’s Alfred – yes, it’s that man again – from which the song is taken, and indeed has a CD of it. The song immediately preceding ‘Rule Britannia’ goes: ‘See liberty, virtue and honour appearing / with smiles and caresses each other endearing / to keep the dear blessing so hardly obtained / let virtue secure what our valour has gained / We can only boast of our national right / when liberty, virtue and honour unite’ – surely as ‘inclusive’ a lyric as anyone could wish for.)

So Rule Britannia might be jingoistic, but it’s not as jingoistic as people often think it is; for example, many sing along to the chorus with the triumphalist words ‘Britannia rules the waves!’, whereas the line actually reads ‘Britannia rule the waves’, so the sentiment is an aspiration, not a statement of fact. Moreover, it’s never been de rigueur for the singing of the words to be part of the Last Night of the Proms. Sir Henry Wood, who created the famous concert series and conducted the Last Night every year from 1895 to 1944, apparently never performed the piece with the words, while the format of the Last Night has changed frequently, having only become relatively ossified in fairly recent years. For example, in 1973 I obtained my first cassette recorder, and decided to experiment with it by recording the conclusion of the Last Night of the Proms, which involved physically holding the microphone in front of the TV. It worked and I still have the cassette, so I still have a record of the dulcet tones of the late, great Richard Baker introducing the full version of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, currently a regular part of the Last Night repertoire, by saying that it was the first time it had been performed for very many years.

Of course, the misappropriation of history to serve particular political agendas is nothing new, and it’s certainly not confined to the UK (hello, America). Sadly, I suspect we’re only going to get a lot more of it, but historians need to continue to stick their heads above the parapet to point out the unhistorical and, yes, often hysterical distortions of the record by those with ideological axes to grind. Of course, the likelihood is that the heads in question will be blasted to smithereens from both sides; but ultimately, that’s what historians are for.

It’s publication day!

My latest novel, Armada’s Wake, is being published today by Canelo. This is the third book in the ‘Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal’ trilogy, set in the Tudor period, and completes the forty year saga. As the title suggests, the famous battle against Spain’s vast invasion force forms the centrepiece of the book, but three generations of the Stannard family also have their own personal battles to fight. As with the previous two books, an important thread is provided by the story of Dunwich, ‘England’s Atlantis’, and of the people who lived there.

It’s been very satisfying to bring this story to an appropriate conclusion in this, my eleventh published novel, something which I haven’t yet done with my other series, ‘the Journals of Matthew Quinton’. I have to admit that I was initially sceptical about writing something set in the Tudor period, having probably become jaundiced after too many years of teaching it and seeing far too many novels, films and TV series being set in it. But I swiftly converted myself, partly because the lives of the Stannard family took on a momentum of their own, partly because Dunwich provided such a compelling backdrop and a history which cried out to be better known.

I wanted to conclude this post with an extract from the novel as a ‘teaser trailer’. But I swiftly realised that there’s pretty well no single paragraph, let alone any longer body of text, which doesn’t give away some spoiler or other, particularly for those who have read the second book in the trilogy, Battle’s Flood. So here instead is an extract from the historical note which concludes the book. Those of you who prefer your myths to be sacrosanct are best advised to look away now!

The defeat of the Spanish Armada is one of the best-known and most iconic events in British history. Yes, British, although it was a purely English fleet that took on the supposedly invincible maritime juggernaut dispatched by King Philip II: for example, to this day legends of Armada shipwrecks and sunken treasures fire imaginations from Fair Isle and Tobermory in Scotland to the west coast of Ireland, where Irish rocks put paid to far more hulls than did English guns.

In the Shetland detective thrillers by Anne Cleeves and the wildly successful TV series based on them, the central character, Jimmy Perez, supposedly owes his surname to an ancestor who survived the Armada, while the intricate patterns of sweaters from Fair Isle, Perez’s fictional birthplace, are allegedly inspired by Armada survivors – one of the most commonly used motifs resembles a griffin, the emblem of the town of Rostock, home port of the ship wrecked on the island, El Gran Grifón. In Ireland, survivors were reputedly responsible for introducing, inter alia, thoroughbred horses, Gaelic handball, and the surprisingly swarthy strain of Irish folk named by some the ‘Black Irish’. (A similar legend exists on the island of Westray in Orkney, where the ‘Westray Dons’, descendants of Armada survivors, allegedly formed a separate caste for more than two centuries.)

In a nutshell, then, a Spanish Armada shipwreck is vastly sexier than any ordinary common-or-garden shipwreck, while the story itself has always been irresistible to Hollywood and its ilk.

Sir Francis Drake? Check. Sir Francis Drake nonchalantly playing bowls as the enemy approaches? Check. Underdog apparently battling terrible odds? Check. The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I herself? Check. Queen Elizabeth I delivering one of the most famous speeches of all time? Check. Unlikely victory against aforesaid terrible odds, thanks to either (a) God or (b) climate change, depending on one’s belief system? Check.

All of which presents a humble author attempting to write a fictional story set against the backdrop of the Armada with a number of problems.

In the first place, the central elements of the story are so well known that there is simply no leeway. The fights off Plymouth, Portland and the Isle of Wight, the pursuit up the Channel, the fireship attack at Calais, the subsequent battle off Gravelines, Elizabeth’s visit to the army at Tilbury, and the fate of the Spanish ships, largely shattered on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland, have all been described very much as they happened, as far as it has been possible to do so…

The central elements of the Armada story are certainly very well known, but on the other hand, several elements of the story that everyone thinks they know about it are myths, if not downright whoppers. The famous story of Sir Francis Drake saying he had time to finish his game of bowls and still beat the Spaniards is almost certainly apocryphal – it appears in no contemporary accounts and first emerges in print almost exactly 150 years later, quite probably the invention of the author and herald William Oldys, a man who was said to be ‘rarely sober in the afternoon, and never after supper’, his favourite tipple apparently being porter washed down with gin. Similarly, Queen Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech was not published in any form until 1654, based on a letter written in 1623, thirty-five years after the event, as a polemical argument against better relations with Spain at that time. (Having said that, the letter writer, Leonel Sharp, was present at Tilbury as the Earl of Essex’s chaplain…) Moreover, there are three entirely different versions of what she said, the two less renowned versions being far more contemporary than that containing ‘the heart and stomach of a king’. Having said that, the famous version is exactly the sort of thing Elizabeth undoubtedly did write and say on many occasions…so I hope my treatment of the story will be acceptable to those who still have misty-eyed visions of Flora Robson, Glenda Jackson or Cate Blanchett, depending on one’s vintage, in armour and on horseback.

I hope this whets your appetite for Armada’s Wake! Like the other Stannard books, it’s currently only available in e-formats, but I hope that if you do buy it and read it, you’ll enjoy it.

 

Exciting news for readers of my historical fiction series ‘The Journals of Matthew Quinton’ – three years after the publication of the last two titles, our hero will be returning for more swashbuckling adventures on the high seas during the reign of King Charles II!

This announcement is very much a consequence of the recent lockdown. Like many people, I had plenty of time to do some serious thinking, so I focused long and hard on what I wanted to write next after the completion of the three ‘Jack Stannard’ books. I put together a number of proposals for pitching to my publisher, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that what I wanted to do most of all in the immediate future was to bring the Quinton series to a proper conclusion. Not only did I feel I owed it to my readers, but there was also a strong element of personal fulfilment – in a nutshell, I’ve lived with these characters for so long that I really want to complete their stories. I’m also not getting any younger (although obviously, I’m still far too young to be, say, a US presidential candidate) and now only want to write things I really enjoy and want to write, rather than write things which others think I should write. While I’m very enthusiastic about the other proposals I produced during lockdown, writing a new Quinton book ticks all the boxes in terms of what I really want to do next.

Before you all start clamouring for a publication date so you can pre-order copies in their thousands, I should provide a couple of quick caveats. For various personal reasons, I decided I didn’t want to be tied down to a contractual deadline for the next few months. Moreover, my publisher hasn’t yet agreed to take any new Quinton titles (of course, a flood of messages from readers may help to persuade them!), but if necessary I’ll self-publish the new books. This is a course which several friends and acquaintances have taken with considerable success, and has the added advantage that it would enable the titles to come out in hard copy as well as in e-book form.

So what’s the first of the new books about, you ask? Well, I’ve already flagged that on this site in the past, but the next Quinton adventure is set in 1668 and takes him to the Caribbean, where he encounters the famous buccaneer Henry Morgan. But it’s going to be very far from a ‘shiver me timbers’ pirate adventure, as Matthew is dragged into Morgan’s intrigues while attempting to fulfil a seemingly impossible mission on behalf of a member of the royal family. If all goes to plan, it’ll be an action-packed tale with some unexpected twists along the way. And yes, I have actually started to write it, and yes, it does have a title…but you’re going to have to wait for further ‘teasers’ on this site!

***

Next week I’ll be marking the publication of Armada’s Wake, the third book in my ‘Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal’ trilogy. This will be released by Canelo on Monday 10 August, so next week will be party time!

‘I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth – certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.’ – Harold Pinter

‘Cricket is basically baseball on valium.’ – Robin Williams

‘Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.’ – George Bernard Shaw

 

First and foremost, apologies to my American followers, because this post is going to be about cricket. The sport is regarded by many, both in the States and elsewhere (hello, continental Europe, China, South America…) as completely unfathomable, making it the subject of the sort of lengthy jokes which appear on tea towels. Now, I’ve never been a really huge cricket fan, but I’ve always enjoyed watching the game – I watched on grainy black and white TV as Gary Sobers hit six sixes in one over, no more than twelve miles from where I was sitting; I temporarily stopped teaching History to a bunch of Cornish kids so we could all watch Bob Willis destroy Australia at Headingley in 1981; and I’ve been to Test matches, albeit not for many years. Whisper it softly, but I’ve even played a few times, albeit with astonishing ineptitude. I have opened the batting, though (albeit only when our captain decided to reverse the batting order as a joke), and once turned out in an astonishing fogbound match in the middle of a reclaimed China clay tip, where it was barely possible to see your hand in front of your face, let alone the other players. You know those scenes in Dr Who where s/he’s in what’s meant to be an alien landscape which is all too obviously a large quarry, and the techies in charge of the dry ice are giving it all they’ve got? That.

(Top score, you ask? Nine, but that included two stonking boundaries.)

Anyway, the occasion for such shameless reminiscing on my part is that as I type this, Test match cricket is resuming, albeit behind closed doors and with players isolated in bio-secure zones in stadia which have integral hotels. Some things never change, though – rain is holding up play, i.e. it’s a typical British summer’s day, and England are one wicket down after no time at all, i.e. it’s a typical England performance. To mark the return of cricket, I thought I’d publish something which I stumbled across during the course of my research, and which to the best of my knowledge has never been made public before. In 1882, Mary Gladstone, later Mrs Drew (1847-1927), daughter of and private secretary to the then Prime Minister W E Gladstone, wrote to her close friend Margaret, Lady Cowell Stepney, who’d married (with catastrophic consequences) into the family which I’ve been studying for some 20 years. In this letter, now in the Stepney MSS held by Carmarthenshire Archives, Mary describes a visit to the Oval ground in south London to attend what would become one of the most famous cricket matches of all time – the Test match between England and Australia at which, contrary to all expectation, the mighty imperial motherland and inventor of the game was trounced by the colonial upstarts. So humiliating was the defeat that The Sporting Times proclaimed that English cricket had died, and that the ashes had been cremated and taken to Australia. Ever since, Test series between the two countries have been played ‘for the Ashes’, with the latest instalment having been played out in 2019.

Mary Gladstone clearly knew her cricket and was a close friend of one of the England players, the Hon. Alfred Lyttelton (1857-1913), the wicketkeeper during the match at the Oval. Here, then, originally written on ’10 Downing Street’ headed notepaper, is Mary’s previously unknown eyewitness account of a hugely significant day in the history of sport. Her account surely comprehensively demolishes the idea that the Victorians watched sport in a genteel and detached manner, with stiff upper lips, only the most polite applause, and no exclamation stronger than ‘jolly well played, old chap’. It also puts paid to any suggestion that women’s interest in such sports as cricket is only a relatively recent phenomenon. However, it confirms in spades all the old jokes about British cricketing weather, although Mary’s strategy of turning up to a Test match wearing a fur cloak was possibly a little extreme even at the time. (The events she describes took place on 29 August 1882…)

 

Dearest Maggie, Got to London all safe. Bitter cold and bad showers [plus ca change – D]. Alfred arrived in Downing Street 5 minutes after me. I flew upstairs, saw Papa, explained my apparent bad want in not going with him at once to Hawarden [the family home in north Wales], fetched a fur cloak and drove with Alfred to the Oval. Reached it about 1115, found they wouldn’t begin till 12. Went through much danger from flying cricket balls, the two teams being hard at work practising batting to anybody’s bowling and making a wicket of seats or people or anything that came handy. All the morning which the Australians were in and England fielding [I] sat alone surrounded by 20,000 strangers, it was a little flat having to gasp, clap, groan, laugh, shudder, burst as the case might be, all alone by oneself. However about 2.30 Charles [unidentified – D] arrived and sat with me and once Australia was out for 123 runs Alfred also came until it was his turn to go in.

[Lyttelton batted at number six; the legendary W G Grace opened the batting for England – D]

Only conceive England going in 2nd innings with only 85 to get! We felt certain of an easy victory. At least I didn’t, for I marked the devil in Spofforth’s eye. [Fred Spofforth, 1853-1926, nicknamed ‘the demon bowler’ – D] He is the great Australian bowler, and I felt sure now that I knew he knew he was going to bowl them all out, in spite of their being the most famous batsmen that Great Britain could produce. It was the most frightfully exciting scene as wicket after wicket fell to his deadly balls, whenever a run was made the whole of the vast audience chanted and cheered madly. Alfred stuck in valiantly, playing with the utmost patience and caution, not making runs but simply defending his wicket and getting a run when he safely could. He fell to a frightfully difficult high ball [word unclear – D] but he had made 12. When he left all was over and no further stand was made. [Lyttelton was out at 66-5; the last five wickets fell for only eleven runs – D] The Australians leapt high in [the] air at every successful ball of Spofforth’s and when the last man was clean bowled with only 8 more to win the game, the howl and the mighty rush was beyond anything you could imagine. [Four words omitted – three unclear, but third word is ’empty’] …in an instant swarming with thousands and thousands wildly cheering and waving hats, handkerchiefs and umbrellas. It was sickening for England but still awfully jolly to see. 

And the rest, as the saying goes, is history!

First and foremost, apologies for the lack of blogging of late, caused by a complete inability to think of things to blog about – presumably caused in turn by lockdown ennui. Actually, though, lockdown has proved to be quite productive for me:

• Books read – not really keeping count, but somewhere in the region of 25 (and one of them was The Mirror and the Light, which surely counts quintuple)
• Books abandoned part way through – 5
• Books currently ‘on the go’ – 3
• Books written by self sent off to publisher – 1
• Netflix watched – 0
• Quality TV watched – plenty
• Mindless TV watched – even more
• Local walks discovered – probably around 10
• Manors once owned by William the Conqueror’s sister discovered on said walks – 1
• Lofts tidied – 1

Recently, though, I’ve started to reread some of my own books, not because I’ve run out of other authors’ work to read (books in ‘to read’ pile, either physical or Kindle – somewhere around 30 at least) but essentially to reacquaint myself with the Quinton titles, several of which I haven’t actually read since I finished writing them. I always used to scoff at those actors who appeared on talk shows and said they’d forgotten a lot about the film they were meant to be promoting because they were now so bound up in their next project. But it’s true; even before a book has gone through all its production stages and been published, an author has probably already started writing the next one, or at least planning it. It actually feels quite odd to go back and read one’s own words in this way, rather than during the white heat of the original writing and editing processes, so I thought I’d try to explain some of the thoughts that have gone through my mind as I’ve done so.

• Good grief, did I really write this? I can’t remember doing it.
• Good grief, did I really write this? It’s actually pretty good.
• (A few lines later) Good grief, did I really write this? It’s absolute garbage.
• I wish I’d added this joke / fact / violent character death at this point.
• I wish I’d deleted this adjective / flowery description / character / entire subplot.
• I made that mistake? Phew, what a whopper. Thank goodness nobody seems to have noticed.
• How on earth did that typo somehow slip through all the editing and proofreading stages?
• This book is how long? 

The one that I’m rereading at the moment is the third of the Quinton Journals, The Blast That Tears the Skies. This is set in 1665 and could easily have been given a Friends-like subtitle, ‘The One with the Plague in it’. (Note the date. According to one academic article which I stumbled across the other day, ‘Along with the return of the monarchy London also undergoes restoration after the Great Fire of London in 1665, and a plague the subsequent year’. FAIL.) Some of the passages which I wrote some ten years ago now – ten years!! how did that happen? – seem to me have acquired new layers of meaning in the last few months. See if you agree!

From a passage where Matthew Quinton and his party attend a royal reception at the Banqueting House in Whitehall

…for all the surface bonhomie, the atmosphere was markedly less carefree than usual. The first glance of a courtier is always laden with suspicion: will you prove a rival to me? will you seduce my woman? But that night, men and women eyed each other even more keenly. Was that bead of sweat upon one’s brow merely a natural response to the heat, or the first symptom of the plague? Was that slight cough issuing from Lady So-and-So’s throat the harbinger of doom for us all?

Matthew’s uncle Tristram falls into conversation with his old friend Sir William Petty at a meeting of the Royal Society

‘The mortality rates are troubling so early in the year, particularly in Saint Giles-in-the-Fields’, said Petty gloomily.

‘Mortality rates!’ Tristram scoffed. ‘Not worth the paper they’re printed on, Will. Meaningless numbers. Every man knows that half or more of plague cases never get recorded as such – who wants their houses shut up for all those weeks? And the constables and the aldermen connive in it, of course, so that their wards and parishes don’t lose trade.’

‘Quite, Tristram,’ said Petty. ‘But therefore, and by your own logic, the true incidence of plague must be especially troubling, it being still so early in the season. Yet here we are, the Royal Society, allegedly the finest minds in all of England, and are we putting all our efforts into finding a remedy for the plague? No, we are not! We are –‘

‘Killing cats and getting hens drunk, Will?’

‘Ah – umm – well, perhaps it might have been more revealing if you had tried the Florentine poison upon some poor soul afflicted with the plague.’ Petty shrugged. ‘But I suppose that would have meant bringing him among us, and we could hardly risk infecting this august body with the pestilence…’

Finally, the Quinton family’s eccentric retainer Phineas Musk relaxes after what he considers to be a hard day’s work

Musk had consumed a most acceptable rabbit pie at the Vulture on Cornhill, noticeably quieter than usual as the more timid clientele sought to avoid any risk of infection; he had contemplated the merits of several tankards of prime Wapping ale, and found them satisfactory; best of all, Goodwife Marten, cheerily unconcerned by plague and her marriage vows alike, had proved very willing to entertain him for an hour or so. True, he had seen a beggar drop dead in Portsoken and heard those who ran to attend the corpse proclaim in terror that it was the pestilence, but one less beggar was hardly a matter of much concern. Moreover, Musk had never been within twenty feet of the cadaver, so in his estimation the plague could not trouble him. Besides, it was well known that drinking prodigiously was one of the surest defences against the pestilence. Phineas Musk was doubly secure.