J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Blog Posts

A Matter of Faith

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Religion is often something of an elephant in the room of historical fiction. If the past really is a foreign country where they do things differently, faith is about as different as it gets, and for secular authors in today’s secular western societies, reconstructing its all-pervasiveness is perhaps one of the trickiest challenges of all. Indeed, perhaps it’s a challenge that can never truly be met successfully. The actual mindset of the most profound medieval piety, for example, is unlikely to be very appealing to most modern readers – after all, its nearest modern parallel is the blinkered fundamentalism seen in much TV news coverage of events in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and so forth. Too many authors, though, seem to pass up the challenge entirely. I love the ‘Mistress of the Art of Death’ books by the late, lamented Arianna Franklin, having stumbled upon them by chance in the unlikely setting of the superb Kinokuniya bookshop in Dubai Mall, but the books tend to treat religion perfunctorily, and in the real medieval world one suspects that her central character (a 12th century Sicilian woman doctor practising in England) would have been burned as a witch long before the end of the first book. Series set in even profoundly religious pre-modern societies often have cynical, irreligious central characters who are inevitably going to be more sympathetic to many modern readers: witness Arturo Perez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste or Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond. Obviously there are many honourable exceptions, and it’s both interesting and suggestive that the most successful historical novel of recent times, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, should present religion in a markedly intelligent way, making it absolutely central to the narrative rather than a necessary but reluctant bolt-on. (The same is true of Howard Brenton’s play Anne Boleyn, which recently provided a stimulating evening’s entertainment at the Globe Theatre.)

If an arms-length attitude to religion can be found in much historical fiction as a whole, the problem is multiplied many times over in my particular genre. Throughout whole swathes of naval historical fiction, sightings of God are about as frequent as those of victorious Frenchmen. Jack Aubrey is sceptical of religious enthusiasm and uses the crew’s formal worship enjoined by his orders as a means of bolstering his authority. Forester’s Hornblower is even less of an enthusiast: for instance, the beginning of Lord Hornblower finds him sitting through a particularly boring sermon in Westminster Abbey, his attention wandering in all directions. If this is true of the acknowledged masterpieces of the genre, it is even truer of some of the other series set in the ‘Nelson/Napoleon’ era, where God’s limited appearances are invariably preceded by ‘oh’ or ‘by’, or followed by ‘help me’ or ‘damn it’. Yet many – most? – naval officers of that time were deeply, if conventionally, religious: Adam Duncan’s last act before sailing into battle at Camperdown, and his first act after victory, was to order the crew to assemble for prayer, while Nelson’s prayer before Trafalgar surely proves the point that downplaying the centrality of religion in naval service risks turning one’s characters into thinly disguised modern-day secularists. I’ve had to confront this head-on in the ‘Quinton journals’, for Matthew’s England was a far more religious place than even Nelson’s or Hornblower’s. After all, religion had been (arguably) the principal cause of the civil wars, and although there was a growing scepticism and belief in science (epitomised by such wildly different exemplars as the Earl of Rochester’s atheism and the birth of the Royal Society) there was also a profound legacy of Puritanism on the one hand and a resurgence of militant Anglicanism on the other. Matthew Quinton himself is a conventional churchgoer, rather like the historical Samuel Pepys, but by making the chaplain Francis Gale one of the central characters of the series and having frequent allusions to the actual prayers, psalms and forms of service that would have been used, I hope I’ve given due weight to the centrality of religion. For one thing, the period saw the first appearance of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, an undoubted masterpiece of the English language (Gale manages to get hold of an ‘advance copy’ in Gentleman Captain), and it seemed criminal not to call upon such a marvellous source: no words of mine could ever better the Book’s prayers for a ship about to sail into battle, or for thanksgiving after a storm.

Gentleman in the First Person

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A few weeks ago, Susan Keogh, author of the Jack Mallory chronicles, posted a pretty positive and particularly thoughtful review of Gentleman Captain, in which she raised a couple of interesting and important critical points. I’ve been meaning to post about these for some time, but a combination of holidays and the completion of the revised draft of the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, means that I’ve not had a chance to do so until now.

First of all, Susan clearly doesn’t like first person narration, finding it too limiting. In terms of my own reading, I’d largely agree with her – and the use of the first person has caused me a few interesting plot construction issues in Blast, where it’s been essential for me to have more than one viewpoint character. (Having said that, I think the device I’ve adopted to get round the problem works very well, and fortunately, so far and touching a lot of wood, my critical readers agree!) But the reason why I adopted a first person narrative goes back to the very origins of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’. In the early days of writing Gentleman Captain, I experimented with an alternative version of the first few chapters which used third person narration. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel quite as immediate or dramatic, particularly during the shipwreck scene at the very start of the book; and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this experiment confirmed my original instinct. One of my key objectives with the series is to tell the whole story of the Royal Navy from the 1580s, the era of the Spanish Armada, to the 1720s, when something that was much more recognisably the navy of Horatio Nelson was taking shape. Telling the story through the eyes of ‘old Matthew’, and giving him a grandfather who had been one of Drake’s contemporaries and rivals, achieved this purpose admirably as far as I was concerned, and would have been much harder to do from third person viewpoints; moreover, it presented plenty of opportunities for humour, with an archetypal ‘grumpy old man’ comparing the dog days of his youth with the supposedly ‘improved’ world around him.

Susan’s other point is that surely Matthew wouldn’t have been as ignorant of the sea as I’ve made him. Well, the short answer to this is – yes, he would. This was one of the key points about the commissioning of young aristocrats and gentlemen by King Charles II and his brother James; many of them literally were entirely ignorant of the sea, particularly in the early years after the Restoration (the setting of Gentleman Captain). Moreover, many of them actually believed that it was important to remain ‘ignorant’ – seamanship being regarded as a ‘rude, mechanical’ art, and thus beneath the honour and dignity of men of their social status. It’s true that some went against this belief, and I’ve based Matthew on the likes of Captain Francis Digby, a real historical figure of the 1660s whose manuscript journals reveal that he gradually – but only gradually – became a highly competent navigator and seaman. But there were others who held to the older philosophy that a captain was essentially in charge of the military aspects of a ship’s operations alone, and in The Mountain of Gold (and then much more extensively in Blast) I’ve introduced the character of Matthew’s friend Captain Beau Harris, who is again based on several real people and who actually revels in his determination to learn nothing of the seaman’s art, in order to provide a sharper counterpoint to Matthew’s determination to improve. One of the key themes of the series of ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’ will be the way in which ‘gentlemen captains’ like Matthew Quinton gradually won out, thus preparing the ground for the Jack Aubreys and their real-life equivalents in the future. But it wasn’t an overnight process, and during the 1660s many a young captain like Matthew Quinton might well have struggled with an inner conflict between received opinions of what should be beneath the honour of a gentleman and their own recognition of the qualities necessary for a successful ship’s captain.

The Importance of Being ‘The’

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Writing historical fiction is full of potential minefields, and rather than feeling their way circumspectly past the lethal lumps in the ground, some authors seem almost to rejoice in crossing the field like blind twenty-stone gorillas on pogo sticks. Perhaps this is particularly true of language. Obviously, replicating the original speech patterns and language is impossible – presumably The Name of the Rose would have sold rather fewer copies of it had been written in the appropriate Norman French and Greek – but go too far to the other extreme and the linguistic thought police will soon be on your case. Take, for example, the TV series Downton Abbey, where people with rather too much time on their hands have objected pedantically to anachronisms of every kind; I believe someone even suggested no husband would have called his wife a bitch in 1916 (presumably this mindset might struggle to cope with, say, Pepys calling a girl a slut in his diary entry for 15 December 1661).

When it comes to early modern British history, the mines tend to be chock full of the shrapnel of semantics and above all that peculiarly British WMD, the grapeshot of aristocratic titles. The latter, in particular, always tends to throw the best. The West Wing is undoubtedly one of the greatest TV series ever written and one of my all-time favourites, but even there, knowledgeable Brits galore would have tittered at the hilariously implausible set of titles accorded to Roger Rees’s shambolic but deceptively brilliant character, Lord John Marbury. I had a query recently from someone who had assumed that because nowadays only Privy Councillors are entitled to be addressed as ‘Right Honourable’, that was always the case. Not so; in the 17th and 18th centuries, Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty (note: not ‘Lord Commissioners’) were equally entitled to be so addressed. It was an age obsessed with precedence; witness the arcane incident described by Pepys in 1668. I’ve tried to reflect this in the journals, for example by attempting to get forms of address as accurate as possible. In the newly completed third book, The Blast That Tears The Skies, I have a scene set at a council of war where the attendees include the Duke of York, the Duke of Cumberland, and the Duke of Monmouth. But the former, as son and brother to Kings of England, was addressed as ‘Your Royal Highness’; Cumberland (Prince Rupert), a foreign prince, was addressed as ‘Your Highness’; and Monmouth, as a non-royal duke, was addressed as ‘Your Grace’. In the Quinton journals, Matthew is the brother of an Earl. Modern (i.e. Victorian) etiquette dictates that he would be entitled to be addressed as ‘the Honourable’, and I’ve used this occasionally, but it wasn’t a hard and fast rule in the seventeenth century. And so on. Phew – think I got through that minefield, anyway…

All of which is a very long-winded way of getting to my main point. The naval historical fiction genre is dominated by the age of Nelson and Napoleon, and by then, British warships were normally known as HMS Unspeakable, without the definite article (which, of course, the French have retained). However, any author who tries to apply the same principle before about 1750 – even, to an extent, 1780 – is metaphorically jumping up and down on one of the biggest lumps in the minefield. Before that time, British warships (and I’ll come to the whole ‘English/British’ thing in a later blog) were never named without the definite article, and ‘His/Her Majesty’s Ship’ was never, ever, abbreviated. This might seem to be one of the pedantic oddities of the Quinton journals, but it’s simply an attempt to stay true to the practice of the times. This is why the title page of Part One of The Mountain of Gold begins ‘His Majesty’s Ship, the Wessex’ and Part Three ‘His Majesty’s Ship, the Seraph’, and why you will never see the abbreviation ‘HMS’ in any of the books. I think this piece of semantics has two important consequences. The definite article seems to me to make the ship more unique, more distinctive, more of a ‘personality’ in its own right; while the full form, ‘His Majesty’s Ship’, reminds us that this really was a ‘royal navy’, the property of the monarch, and – in Charles II – a monarch who felt a real affinity with, and played a hugely significant part in reshaping, the service that defended the nation in his name. So long live ‘the’!

Time to Launch!

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Welcome to my new blog!

So let’s get straight into the FAQs…

1/ You already have a blog, so why start this one? True – I’ve been writing the View From the Lair blog for a few years now and have thoroughly enjoyed doing it. But I’ve come to realise that just blogging occasionally about whatever takes my fancy is actually pretty unsatisfying for me, and probably far more unsatisfying for the readers of my books. I’ll keep View From the Lair ‘live’, though, so I can use it as a vehicle for an occasional rant or digression from the themes of this blog – for example, as with my new post about rioting in the UK.

2/ So what will be different about this one? Recently, I was impressed by the advice offered in Joel Friedlander’s blog. The points about using a blog to explain aspects of one’s work and to try out new ideas really struck me, and I thought I could also use a new blog to develop what has always been one of my principal motivations in writing the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’ – namely raising awareness of 17th century naval history. I was also struck by the advice about publishing to a regular schedule: common sense, really, and a message that’s constantly reinforced at home by Wendy (the ‘Lady Quintonjournals’ of my Twitter feed!) who runs the Guardian Teacher Network and thus knows a thing or two about communicating with audiences online.

3/ What specifically will you be blogging about? I’ve got a lot of ideas that should keep me going for ages! These include the pros and cons of having a first person narrator, how to treat religion seriously in historical fiction, how far to take liberties with real events and real people, and – starting with the first proper post, next Monday – the importance in naval history of ‘the’. (Confused? Watch this space!) I’m also going to be floating some ideas for future Quinton stories and bringing you news about exciting developments over Quinton e-books. There’ll also be regular progress reports about, and insights into the research for, my new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales.

4/ When will new posts come out? I’m determined to publish new blog posts to a regular schedule, unlike my track record with View From the Lair! The current plan is for each new post to come out weekly, on a Monday.

5/ Finally, why ‘Gentlemen and Tarpaulins’? This was the title of my first book, published exactly twenty years ago by Oxford University Press (and still available from them via ‘print on demand’!). A lot has happened since then, but even so, that was where it all began – and of course, central to the ‘Quinton Journals’ is the relationship between the ‘gentleman captain’ Matthew Quinton and the ‘tarpaulin’ Kit Farrell, so the title seemed appropriate on several counts.