J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Fiction

The Agonising

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As far as I’m aware, there’s no collective noun for a gathering of historical novelists; but if there was, it would probably be ‘an agonising’.

This was demonstrated in spades last week, at the 2018 conference of the Historical Novel Society. What do historical novelists agonise about? Pretty much everything, really…but more of that anon. First, the venue. This was something of an oddity: recent UK conferences have been held in such obvious locations as London and Oxford, but this one was held in a vast, modern golf hotel on the outskirts of that renowned historical destination…umm, Cumbernauld. (And when I say vast, I mean vast. My room was literally the furthest one from reception; as a result, I’ve now qualified for the British 20K walking team at the 2020 Olympics.) I guess that for obvious reasons, venues in Edinburgh would have been far too expensive, not to mention booked up long ago, but it seems slightly odd that the society didn’t find anywhere in Glasgow, which has history galore…on the other hand, the hotel in question had the not inconsiderable claim to fame of having the Antonine Wall literally next door. Even so, the relatively few golfers who had the misfortune to be staying there at the same time must have wondered what on earth had hit them, as they and historical novelists are hardly a natural combination (although, perhaps, a perfect one as the basis for a murder mystery: ‘aha, Inspector Rebusmorse Clouseau, you mean zis writer of late Roman fiction has been killed by un golfer with ze handicap of less than eight?’).

So back to my original premise, namely that when a large crowd of historical novelists get together, they agonise. And these, in no particular order, are some of the things that they agonise about, one or more of which formed the basis of many conversations held in the bar, at the breakfast or dinner tables, and in the Q&A sessions.

  • WIPs. The few stray golfers were probably confused and alarmed by what they might have taken to be endless references to whips, and perhaps wondered whether they’d stumbled into a convention of sado-masochists. To a novelist, however, the WIP is the current Work In Progress, and hardly any conversation at the conference that I was involved in or overheard didn’t have, at some point, the obligatory outpouring of angst about the state of one’s WIP. (Too long! Too short! Too boring! Too many plotlines! Too few plotlines! Too many characters! Too few characters! Too much dialogue! Too little dialogue!…and so on ad infinitum)
  • Agents. The getting of same (by those without); grumbles about same (by those with).
  • Publishers. Ditto.
  • Self-publishing. Should I? Shouldn’t I?
  • Research. How much is too much? Conversely, is a vague recollection of a 1968 article in Look and Learn an adequate amount of research?
  • Authenticity and accuracy. Should I inflict on myself dysentery, plague, and stab wounds from a rusty sword, to get the full authentic ‘feel’ of the Middle Ages? (Note: the correct answer is ‘no’.)

And so on. However, historical novelists don’t just agonise; they also bitch. And oh boy, when they bitch, they bitch for England, Wales, Scotland, the USA, or whatever their country of origin might be. These bitching sessions become more and more bitter as the evening wears on, but they always tend to follow a similar pattern: ‘so-and-so might have sold shedloads of books, but s/he can’t construct a grammatically correct sentence to save his or her life’, or ‘I mean, just how inaccurate is his (or her) description of the Defenestration of Prague?’, or ‘my copy editor is an absolute ****’.

Anyway, from the tone of this blog thus far, you may be wondering why on earth I go to such events. The answer, of course, is a very simple one – what the Irish would call the craic. Writing is, by definition, a pretty solitary occupation, so the very rare opportunities to get together with one’s fellow practitioners are usually to be jumped at. The HNS conference always means meeting up with old chums one hasn’t seen since the last one, and is particularly special because a substantial American contingent always comes over for it (the conference takes place in the States in odd numbered years, although I haven’t yet managed to get across the pond for one of those). There’s also an opportunity to meet fellow authors one hasn’t encountered before, and I was particularly pleased to meet K M Ashman, a fellow countryman (and fellow rugby fan!) who’s followed terrific success via self-publishing by getting snapped up by ‘mainstream’ publishers. I can’t wait to get started on Kevin’s medieval Welsh history series!

You might be wondering by now what actually happened at the conference, apart from the agonising, and the bitching, and the socialising. Well, those were far and away the most important ingredients (and in that, of course, there are considerable similarities with academic conferences, which I’ve blogged about before). But there were also such delights as playing Bestselling Author Bingo (‘Alison Weir!’ ‘Ben Kane!’ ‘J D Davies!’ – OK, yes, I made that up), the Random Re-enactors, and, above all, the conference gala dinner – which, as this was in Scotland, culminated in a ceilidh. However, as most of the participants were non-Scots and, generally speaking, not people who need worry about being challenged over their age in an off-licence, the results were pretty calamitous. (Solution: adjourn to bar, resume bitching.) This time, though, and sadly, some time-honoured traditions of the HNS conference went by the wayside, for reasons unknown to your humble blogger – no more late night readings of sex scenes after the gala dinner (I kid you not), no historical costume parade, and, sadly, no Robin Ellis, aka the original Poldark, who was meant to be the star turn but who’d had to have an operation instead (he’s fine, which is excellent news).

Oh yes, I almost forgot, there were serious sessions with talks! From experience, I know that few things are more boring than reciting all the talks one’s attended at a conference, so I’ll just mention my personal favourite – which none of you will be surprised to hear was the one on the do’s and don’ts of nautical fiction. The panel consisted of three colleagues whom I’ve got to know well in recent years, especially as a result of the Weymouth Leviathan festival in 2016 (sadly a one-off, with plans to make it annual or biennial having fallen by the wayside): Linda Collison, all the way from Denver, Colorado, who’s had a varied career, including fitting in lots of sea time, and who writes nautical fiction with, unusually, a female central character; Alaric Bond, all the way from, umm, Sussex, who’s just brought out his thirteenth book in a very different kind of Napoleonic Wars naval series (rather than having one central character who rises to glory through the series, a la C S Forester, Patrick O’Brian and Julian Stockwin, he makes the entire crew his ‘hero’); and Antoine Vanner, who writes the excellent ‘Dawlish Chronicles’ series of Victorian naval fiction. Antoine is a great guy with a wealth of life experience, having lived or worked in getting on for two dozen countries, but there’s a part of me that would like to stick pins in a voodoo doll of him…in addition to bringing out full length books about once a year, he blogs on little known but fascinating aspects of naval history twice a week (and pretty much without fail), sends out a monthly newsletter to his fans, and writes additional short stories with the same central characters just for the people on his mailing list! As well as putting my own workrate to shame, he’s also a terrific public speaker, and as Linda and Alaric are no slouches in that regard either, the panel really fizzed, with lots of questions from a really engaged audience. I’d been primed to put my hand up if nobody else did, but in the end, I wasn’t needed. The questions, and indeed the talks themselves, focused on themes that have appeared many times in this blog, such as the level of technical nautical language to deploy, the pleasures and perils of research, and getting the balance right between action set at sea and on land.

So all in all, it was a terrific event, and well worth the long haul to Cumbernauld!

Anyway, if it’s Sunday, it must be Scotland – and if it’s next Friday, it must be France, for reasons I’ll blog about in due course.

 

The Spirit of Not Dead Fred Revisited

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For the next few weeks, I’m going to have my head down as I work on the first of my new Tudor naval novels, so I’m clearing the decks of as many other commitments and distractions as I can – and that includes blogging, for the time being at any rate. So I thought I’d use the opportunity to revisit a few more posts from the earlier days of this website, starting with this one from 2013. I don’t think I need to change or update any of the text, but I haven’t checked that all the links still work.

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I am not dead yet

I can dance and I can sing

I am not dead yet

I can do the Highland Fling

(‘Not Dead Fred’ from Spamalot)

I’ve always been intrigued by the possibilities presented by overlaps between generations. This might have been partly a consequence of the odd generational quirks within my own family: because my grandfather’s formidable brood of siblings (of whom more in a future post) were born twenty-two years apart, my father had a first cousin who was a year younger than me, and there were similar oddities on my mother’s side. Even more marked generational shifts often characterise the complex family lives of aged rock stars, actors and the like, whose children by very late marriages are sometimes younger than their grandchildren via the first marriage. In a historical sense, though, I think I probably first became fully aware of the implications of these chronological curiosities during a talk given to the J R Green Society during the late 1970s. This was the History society of Jesus College, Oxford, named after the finest historian the college ever produced, and the speaker was Richard Cobb, the eminent historian of the French Revolution. My tutor claimed to have invited Cobb so that we undergraduates had a chance to hear him ‘before he went pop’. His pessimism about Cobb’s likely life expectancy was a consequence of a lifestyle beautifully summed up in this obituary from The Independent:

His style of teaching, talking, drinking, and after-dinner behaviour – chariot racing in Balliol senior common room was the least of his exploits – made this shy, often uneasy man a living legend. Cobb was thin, looked like a cross between Voltaire and George VI, and was once described by a friend as the dirtiest soldier he had ever seen. His eyes were usually drunk, with curiosity or alcohol, but his capacity to recover from the night before was the envy of his students. 

The living legend did indeed become fairly well lubricated that evening, but then, so did we all (the passing of the port decanter was one of the long-standing traditions of the society); and despite my tutor’s pessimism, Cobb survived for the best part of twenty more years. I can’t remember most of what he talked about, although whether that can be attributed to the passing of the years or the passing of the port is debatable. However, he related one anecdote which made a lasting impression on me. I forget the precise connections, but it was something along these lines: as a child (he was born in 1917), he knew or was related to an elderly person who, in turn, as a child had known a very, very old lady who remembered watching Bonnie Prince Charlie ride into Edinburgh in 1745. As a good historian, I assume Cobb built in the obvious cautionary warnings about depending on the unsupported memories or, indeed, the words themselves, of two very old people; but his essential point was that it was chronologically possible to be just two degrees of separation away from an event that seemed impossibly far back in time, or in other words, that the past is closer to us than we might think.

Cobb’s anecdote had a lasting impact on both my teaching and my writing. Back in the 1990s, for example, I used to infuriate generations of students by asking them when they thought the last widow of an American Civil War soldier died; of course, it was a trick question, because she was still alive (in fact, the two candidates for the title of Last Confederate Widow died as recently as 2004 and  2008). For all its faults, the dreaded Wikipedia occasionally throws up some fascinating individual pages, and one of them is its list of the last known survivors of major wars. This includes quite a few pretty dubious candidates – Joseph Sutherland, shown as the last British survivor of Trafalgar, doesn’t appear on the listings of those who fought in the battle – but also presents some intriguing claims: was William Hiseland really the last survivor of the British civil wars, dying in 1733 aged 112 (after fighting at Malplaquet at the age of 89)? if Sir Richard Haddock, who served every regime from the Rump Parliament to George I, really was the last surviving veteran of the first Anglo-Dutch war (which I very much doubt), who were the last survivors of the second and third?

But these long-lived survivors are more than mere curiosities; they also represent embodiments of communal memory, as Harry Patch, Henry Allingham and the other last survivors of World War One came to do. For instance, Samuel Pepys often called on Sir Richard Haddock for his recollections of precedents from the 1650s (or even earlier, for Haddock’s grandfather served in Elizabeth’s reign). At one time, too, the wisdom and example of previous generations was deliberately called upon to inspire new generations. In Britannia’s Dragon I relate how, one day in the 1890s, a party of young naval cadets was taken to see Admiral Henry James Raby, the first man ever to wear the Victoria Cross. One of them was duly inspired by the old hero, and recorded the fact in his autobiography: he was to become Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, one of Britain’s greatest naval officers of World War Two.

Similarly, people whom one associates entirely with one era have a disconcerting habit of living on into others. A classic pub quiz round involves giving teams a list of people and asking them whether they’re alive or dead; I once foundered disastrously on Kirk Douglas, having erroneously assumed that he must have shuffled off the mortal coil years ago. (And long may the great man, star of one of my favourite films – The Vikings – continue to grace us with his presence.) The facts that Herbert Hoover outlived John F Kennedy and that Thomas Hardy was around when the BBC began broadcasting still seem downright bizarre. Then again, I once had the privilege of being shown the Imperial Crypt in Farnham, where the Emperor Napoleon III, his wife and son are buried. It was only then that I realised the Empress Eugenie had lived on until 1920, having survived her husband by almost half a century and having lived through the whole of World War I. (Empress longevity is clearly endemic: Zita, last Empress of Austria-Hungary, died as recently as 1989, the last grandchild of the Queen-Empress Victoria died six months before Charles and Diana got married, and, of course, the last Empress of India – the Queen Mother – lived on into the twenty-first century.)

When I came to write the Quinton Journals, all of these perspectives on ‘overlapping’ generations helped to shape my portrayal of Matthew’s character. He’s meant to be writing in the late 1720s when he’s in his late eighties, but can clearly recall his grandfather, who fought against the Spanish Armada (old Earl Matthew’s life dates were based closely on those of the real last surviving Armada captain, Edmund, Earl of Mulgrave, who died at the end of the first Civil War). In that sense, he ‘writes’ very much in the spirit of ‘Not Dead Fred’, although even in his younger days, I don’t think you’d have caught Matthew doing the Highland Fling! Although he was very young when the civil wars took place, Matthew’s life was moulded, and to some extent dominated, by the huge collective trauma of that conflict; indeed, that would have been true of the vast majority of people in the British Isles, and I’ve tried to reflect that in the mindsets of the principal characters in the series. Indeed, when the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ took place in 1679-81, one of the most common cries was ‘Forty-One is come again’ – in other words, that the history of the civil war, which everyone aged about forty-five and over would have remembered, was repeating itself. In my opinion, historical novels should always have this grounding in their own past; after all, as Richard Cobb implied all those years ago, it’s much, much closer than we often think!

The Sandwich of Xanadu

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Last week, I went along to the Historical Writers’ Association Christmas bash. This is always great fun – it’s good to touch base with one’s fellow practitioners, especially because our line of work is, by definition, pretty solitary. Above all, it’s always reassuring to find that author A has exactly the same issues that you do with editor X, publisher Y, or major retail outlet Z, or else that they’re encountering exactly the same problems with completing their latest works in progress.

Or, to put it another way…

These are the things that historical novelists obsess about, in no particular order.

Is it any good DEADLINES agents publishers royalties ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE OF CHOICE coffee editors readers ONE STAR REVIEWS accuracy research BERNARD CORNWELL contracts advances royalties DOES ANYBODY READ ME coffee voice show don’t tell ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE OF CHOICE genre accuracy FIVE STAR REVIEWS coffee Amazon DEADLINES character narrative research ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE OF CHOICE coffee Twitter Facebook HILARY BLOODY MANTEL Goodreads royalties publishers coffee blogging EFFING EDITORS dialogue authenticity coffee ONE STAR REVIEWERS WHO DIDN’T ACTUALLY READ THE DAMN BOOK research narrative ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE OF CHOICE coffee royalties REAL LIFE publishers IS IT ANY DAMN GOOD coffee OH MY GOD IS THAT THE TIME is it any good Aaaaaaaargh

More or less all of these got airings at the HWA get-together, along with such natural conversation topics as the death of Oliver Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution (there was a ‘seventeenth century huddle’ at one point), chafing Roman armour, Brexit and Viagra. Today, though, I’m going to focus on just one topic, namely research. I’ve touched on this before – indeed, this blog has now been going for so long that I think I’ve touched on most things before – but I’ve obtained quite a different perspective on it since I started working on my new Tudor naval stories for Endeavour Ink.

One of the big pluses of writing the Quinton series is that I’d already done the research – over thirty years of it, at a serious academic level. So in most cases, the stories have come ready hatched, and I haven’t needed to do that much supplementary research; besides, having now written three weighty tomes about late seventeenth century naval history, I’m in the reasonably comfortable position that if a reader wants to challenge something I’ve written in one of the Quinton novels, s/he’s going to have to go to one of my ‘serious’ books to try and prove me wrong. Result.

Not so with the Tudor era, though. True, I’d taught the Tudors at A-level for many years, so am fine with the key events and personalities, the issues and mores of the period, and so forth. But if one’s going to write something authentic – an issue raised previously in this blog, notably here and here – then the research needs to be a lot more detailed than that, so in some respects I had to start from scratch. In terms of the naval side of things, for example, a lot changed in the 100 years or so between when my new stories are set and the time period of the Quinton journals. Ships were very different, and so were some of the technical terms; by the 1650s-60s, for instance, the leading squadron of a fleet was the vanguard, but in the mid-sixteenth century it was the vanward. Yes, I know these are the sorts of things that anywhere up to 99% of readers probably won’t pick up on, but this is where the perfectionism, or pedantry if you prefer, of the average historical novelist kicks in (especially when said average historical novelist has worked, and still works, as a ‘pukka’ historian too).

In a sense, though, the naval side of things has proved to be the easy part – after all, some things were different, but very many were pretty much the same. But much of the land-based action is set in a very specific and unique place, and so as not to give the game away, I’m going to give this an alias, namely Xanadu. I already knew Xanadu quite well, and already had a number of books about its history. But when I realised that a large chunk of my new Tudor stories would be set there, I realised I needed to delve much more deeply than that, especially if I was going to try and reconstruct how the inhabitants would have lived and what their concerns might have been. Luckily, there’s an excellent book on religion in the Xanadu area during the Tudor period, not to mention other books and articles which give important insights into its history, so it was a case of heading off to the British Library and mining all of those. Then there are lots of detailed archaeological reports, which make it possible to reconstruct the topography of Tudor Xanadu in some detail, and most of those are freely available online.

Most importantly, though, I’ve been back to Xanadu and its immediate area for a couple of extended stays. As with the Quinton series, where I went to Gothenburg to do fieldwork for The Lion of Midnight and paced the streets of the City of London for Death’s Bright Angel, nothing beats actually going to your location to get the sense of place right. You can walk the exact routes your characters took, thereby getting time, distance and direction right; work out lines of sight and basic topography; maybe make some unexpected discoveries about the relationship of place A to place B that you’d simply never have realised from books and maps, or even Google Earth; and, if they still survive, you can go into the exact buildings where you’re going to set some of your scenes, both to get your descriptions as accurate as possible and, if you’re very lucky, to get that indefinable sense of atmosphere which will hopefully add to the finished book. Of course, it’s possible to get away with doing none of this – famously, Diana Gabaldon had never been to Scotland before she wrote Outlander – but it works for me; and, of course, it provides wonderful excuses to go and visit nice parts of the world!

Above all, though, it’s critical to bear in mind one of the most vital rules of historical fiction – the story rules the research, not vice-versa. That’s why I wrote the first Tudor story in full before doing what I’m doing now, i.e. putting in many of the points of detail and local atmosphere, and quite a few of my colleagues work in the same way (not just in the historical field; famous crime novelist Ian Rankin also writes first, then puts in most of the material from his research afterwards).

So in a sense, then, a historical novel should be like a sandwich: research first, up to a certain but not overwhelming level; writing, the real meat, in the middle; then a second slab of research on top to finish it all off.

Here endeth the lesson…and all of this talk of food makes me think it’s time for coffee and biscuits.

Authentic Headless Women Revisited, Now With Extra Tortured Cats

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The middle of August, so lots going on, almost none of it seriously work-related – lawns to mow, places to visit, etc. As an ex-teacher of many years’ drudgery service, I still have the mindset that August is pretty sacrosanct, even though that imperative doesn’t really work for writers. Even so, I suspect that many readers of this blog will already be ensconced on beaches or at poolsides, and my ramblings about naval history or the seventeenth century are, quite rightly, unlikely to be high on their list of priorities. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that this week, I’m reblogging a post from the very early days of this blog, albeit one that explains my throwaway remark in last week’s post about ‘headless women’ on book covers. Now, given that we seem to live in an age when many people believe that references to ‘cats’ eyes’ being removed mean – wait for it – that real cats are being tortured, with the result that one council has decided to rename them ‘road studs’ rather than telling the poor little snowflakes in question to grow up and get over it, I suppose it’s incumbent on me to clarify that I didn’t mean that book covers show graphic images of real decapitated women. 

(Oh God, that I’ve lived to have to type that sentence…)

So let’s return to those innocent days in September 2012…

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I spent last weekend at the Historical Novel Society conference in London. This was a marvellous, invigorating occasion, with lots of great networking; it was particularly good to meet my fellow panellists in the ‘Ships Ahoy’ forum on nautical fiction, namely Linda Collison, Helen Hollick, Margaret Muir and Rick Spilman. The fact that the majority of speakers – and attendees – were women speaks volumes for the extent to which the genre has been transformed in recent years. Our five mini-talks covered a variety of issues; mine was on the vexed question of accuracy (see below) and about the need to show respect in one’s writing for the sea and those who sailed on it, a theme that others echoed. We received some stimulating questions, notably of the ‘where do I find information about…’ variety, and also had plenty of opportunity to bounce ideas around among ourselves. In a way, though, we thought that nautical historical fiction was a little bit on the margins of the conference; but then, pretty much everybody who isn’t writing about the Romans or the Tudors was saying pretty much exactly the same thing.

I don’t propose to go through who said what in each session. Instead, I thought I’d highlight just one or two of the main themes that emerged, and perhaps the biggest of them was the perennial debate about accuracy and authenticity in writing historical fiction. In a nutshell – to what extent should a historical novelist aim for accuracy? Is it possible not to be entirely accurate but to remain ‘authentic’ to a period? Can accuracy and authenticity actually be counter-productive if taken too far, and besides, how do we define them? After all, Wolf Hall has been praised to the heights for its ‘authenticity’ – but a generation is now growing up that thinks Thomas Cromwell was a nice guy. I liked Ian Mortimer’s concept called ‘Celia Brayfield’s Barbed Wire’: she was reviewing a Catherine Cookson book in which the principal characters had to negotiate a barbed wire fence in 1896, couldn’t believe it was in use at the time, and by the time she’d checked and found that it was, the spell had been broken. As Ian says, ‘in historical fiction, accuracy and authenticity are not necessarily desirable’. Several of the speakers also adopted this line, which agrees with my own thinking, namely that altering facts to fit a narrative is fine; after all, in Gentleman Captain I moved the date of Easter 1662  and wasn’t subsequently inundated by protest letters from outraged theologians and chronologists. (As I said in my talk, though, I draw the line at altering the sequence of events during real battles, although obviously I’ll insert Matthew Quinton and a fictional ship in place of a real one; those who fought, suffered and died in those battles deserve that respect.) As several panellists said, historians can be sniffy about historical novelists’ willingness to change things around, but as a historian myself, I think this ‘holier than thou’ attitude rests on very weak foundations. Historians interpret the past and ‘change things’ by deciding to include or omit particular facts from their accounts; the idea that they are objective, detached analysts of the past is frankly risible, as historians usually have their own personal or political agendas. If anything, historical novelists are simply much more up front about what they do: as Emma Darwin put it, ‘We make things up. Get over it’.

There was also much discussion of the stunning lack of imagination in cover designs for historical fiction. This can be summed up pretty succinctly: if it’s for a male audience, stick a sword on it; if it’s for a female audience, give it a headless woman in a nice dress. Now I don’t know a lot about art, and I know even less about marketing, but it seems to me that the acronym ‘USP’ is rendered pretty meaningless if every book ends up looking pretty much the same as every other one. (I’m just glad that my own publishers have been much more imaginative with the covers of the Quinton series, which has always been intended for both male and female readers.) Having said that, I suppose nautical fiction falls into the same trap to some extent. After all, when was the last time you saw a naval historical novel without a ship on the cover?

Anyway, the net effect of my attendance at the conference is that I’m now brimming with ideas for future books galore: I particularly like the potential of a plot that involves teenage wizards battling teenage vampires before engaging in torrid bondage sex with the gladiators who guard the Holy Grail. (Still working on that one – 2017 ed.) Before I move on to develop that, though, I need to start the detailed plot construction for ‘Quinton 5’, provisionally titled The Battle of All the Ages and based around the remarkable Four Days’ Battle of 1666. This means that next week, I’ll be going through my usual process at the outset of a new book, namely locking myself away in a cottage for a week so that I don’t drive Wendy nuts as I bounce ideas (and, possibly, myself) off the walls. So I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to blog next Monday – much will depend on whether or not I have a mobile broadband signal, on whether I have any time to spare from ‘blue skies thinking’ if I do, and on whether or not my brain will have been fried by spending too much time in May and June 1666. In case I don’t make it, though, you can find another helping of me on the wonderful Hoyden and Firebrands blog, where I’m this week’s guest blogger!

On This Spot, In 1753, Nothing Happened. Or Alternatively, It Did. [Rebooted]

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Ridiculously busy ATM as I enter the home straight with the new Quinton novel, The Devil Upon the Wave, and try to finish off a couple of other commitments ASAP too, so a re-blog this week of a post from the relatively early days of this site, back in January 2013. However, this has regained its contemporary resonance thanks to the current presence on TV of an adaptation of Len Deighton’s alternative history novel, SS-GB…and in an age of ‘alternative facts’, alternative history is arguably more popular, and certainly more pertinent, than ever. Indeed, I really want to have a crack at writing some myself one day, although convincing my agent and publisher is taking a little doing! So let’s go back to those innocent days of January 2013, when Barack Obama was about to be sworn in for his second term…(and there’s a piece of alternative history for my American friends straight away – what if the twenty-second amendment had never been passed?)

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I’ve just finished reading one of my Christmas presents, C J Sansom’s alternative history novel Dominion. This is set in 1952, but a very different 1952: Lord Halifax, rather than Churchill, becomes Prime Minister in 1940 and sues for peace after Dunkirk, as a result of which Hitler obtains a free hand in Europe while giving Britain similar carte blanche in its Empire, the arrangement which Hitler always said he wanted. So by 1952, Britain is ruled by a vicious right-wing regime headed by Lord Beaverbrook, with Oswald Mosley as Home Secretary and Enoch Powell as India Secretary. (Having pretty much started my research on the 17th century navy thirty-plus years ago by reading Sir Arthur Bryant’s classic Pepys trilogy, I particularly loved Sansom’s throwaway line that the ‘Fascist fellow traveller’ Bryant was now education minister.) Churchill is leading an increasingly widespread and successful armed resistance, while in Berlin, Hitler is dying of Parkinson’s disease, and in Washington, Adlai Stevenson has just become President after twelve years of a Republican, isolationist White House. Sansom’s creation of this alternative world is remarkably impressive, his attention to detail quite extraordinary – for example, as someone who’s spent many hours working at the Institute of Historical Research in London University’s Senate House, I loved the idea of it having been taken over by the German Embassy (ambassador – Erwin Rommel), with Gestapo torture cells in the basement where I used to thumb through the 17th and 18th century editions of the London Gazette. Having said that, I thought that the plot itself was a bit disappointing – a massive and distinctly unlikely coincidence followed by a fairly conventional chase thriller and a somewhat flat ending. Overall, though, I enjoyed it a great deal, principally because of its brilliant depiction of a chillingly plausible alternate reality, and thought I’d use it as a launch pad in this blog for some thoughts about alternative histories and their validity.

Before I do so, however, I want to comment on what is, in some respects, the most remarkable thing about Dominion, namely Sansom’s author’s note. Much of this is taken up by a lengthy, vitriolic and highly personal attack on the Scottish National Party and its leader, Alec Salmond. This seems bizarre on several levels. While the excesses of nationalism certainly form one of the central themes of the book, Scotland plays only a small and tangential part in the plot; while one wonders how on earth Sansom’s publisher let his rant see the light of day, given its likely effect on sales north of the border. (Equating Scottish nationalists, even if only implicitly, with German nationalists wearing SS uniforms and Mosley’s Blackshirts,  is hardly likely to be classed as a PR triumph.) Whether authors should use their notes as bully pulpits in this way is a moot point, of course. Sansom had put across the point that ‘nationalism = bad’ clearly enough in the book, including the odd side-swipe at the SNP, so on one level, spelling it out in such an explicit way in an author’s note as well might be considered excessive, and perhaps even patronising to a readership who are assumed to be too lumpen to pick up on the (already not particularly subtle) anti-nationalism message in the novel itself. Moreover, I don’t recall George Orwell feeling the need to hammer home the message that ‘totalitarianism = bad’ in separate author’s notes tacked on to the ends of 1984 or Animal Farm; his texts alone spelled out the message, in the most powerful manner imaginable. Surely if one wants to get a message across in a novel, the novel itself should do the talking? For what it’s worth, you’ll never get an overt political message in any of my books, certainly not in any of the novels (although I have to admit that I’ve taken a few juicy swipes at Welsh local authorities and politicians of all persuasions in my forthcoming book, Britannia’s Dragon); I might explain the reasons why in a future post!

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Alternative history has a long and respectable pedigree, its offshoot ‘counterfactual history’ a rather shorter but even more respectable one. The difference between the two is explained concisely by an entry in the much-maligned Wikipedia, but to over-simplify outrageously, historians write counterfactual history, and tend to do so as a fun exercise, while novelists write alternative history, and tend to do so to push deeply serious agendas. Many highly distinguished historians contributed ‘counterfactual’ essays to such books as What If? and Virtual History, both published in 2000, while one of my favourite examples of the genre is the brilliant essay by Geoffrey Parker, one of the historians I respect the most, on what might have happened if the Spanish Armada had won – an alternative history also beloved of novelists, most notably in Keith Roberts’ brilliant Pavane. My first introduction to the genre was reading, as a teenager, Winston Churchill’s famous essay on what might have happened if Lee had won at Gettysburg, which opened my eyes to the fundamental truth that many of the great events of history turn upon the very smallest matters of chance and sheer luck. From time to time over the years, I’d dabble in other examples of the genre. For example, the only Kingsley Amis book I’ve ever read is his relatively little-known alternative history novel, The Alteration, which proceeds from the assumption that Catherine of Aragon gave Henry VIII a son, so the Reformation never happened, so twentieth century Britain was still Catholic. But without the challenge of the Reformation, Catholicism – as in Pavane – has remained repressive and hostile to scientific advance; for example, electricity is banned, but great airships cross the Atlantic thanks to sophisticated use of compressed air. The Alteration – the title is a double meaning, the main plot focusing on a struggle to prevent a boy soprano being castrated to preserve his voice – illustrates an important point about alternative history fiction, which is that it’s really a form of alternative science fiction; the difference being that whereas SF takes its starting point as now, alternative history places its starting point somewhere in the past and projects forward from there. In that sense, it’s essentially a literary version of steampunk!

Moreover, the distinctions between the various genres have always been blurred. It could even be argued that all historical fiction is ‘alternative history’ – no historical novel can ever be 100% ‘accurate’, so it’s bound to be presenting an alternative, at least partly imaginary version of the past. A good example of the blurring might be a book like Saki’s When William Came, published in 1913, which I’ve been reading on my Kindle. At the time of publication, it was a deliberately frightening vision of Britain under the rule of a victorious Kaiser, so essentially a work of ‘science fiction’; now, it reads as an alternative history, a sort of Dominion of its day. As such, it’s an example of one of the most useful and important aspects of alternative history, its ability to get us thinking about uncomfortable truths that might have been swept under the carpet by the actual outcome of events. Dominion is very good at bringing this out, thus placing it squarely in the tradition of other accounts of imagined occupations, such as When William Came, Owen Sheers’ Resistance, the classic 1942 movie Went The Day Well? and one of my favourite cult films, the underrated Devil Ship Pirates. So Sansom’s Britons of 1952 are divided between the resisters, those who wish to stay out of politics, and those who admire Nazi Germany and positively relish the opportunity to give free rein to their anti-Semitism and other prejudices. The experience of occupied France and the Channel Islands suggests that this is how things were bound to have been if Britain had lost the war, but it still makes uncomfortable reading.

Some historians still get very stuffy about alternative and counterfactual history, claiming that anything not firmly grounded on documentary evidence isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Personally, I find this attitude terribly blinkered. Of course, good historical writing has to be grounded in fact, based on careful analysis of reliable sources, but to take imagination out of history is rather like draining the colour from a Brueghel painting. In a nutshell, how can we possibly understand the past properly without trying to reconstruct the alternative futures that people living at a particular time imagined might lie ahead of them, or without attempting to get some sort of understanding of their hopes and fears of those futures? To take just one example, let’s consider an event that’s been used as the basis for more than one alternative history book. Let’s imagine that Bonnie Prince Charlie won in 1745, and what might have followed from his victory. A Catholic restoration, probably; but what else? Purges and retribution from above, collaboration and resistance from below – or tolerance, reconciliation and a golden age, as Sir Charles Petrie’s fanciful alternative history suggested? Perhaps a power struggle between the pragmatic Charles on the one hand and his more rigid father and brother on the other? The arrival of a French army to bolster the insecure Jacobite regime? The end of burgeoning democratic institutions such as Parliament and a free press, perhaps – and what might the impact have been on American colonies still thirty years away from asserting their independence? Would they have become independent at all if there was no Seven Years War between King James III & VIII and his staunch ally Louis XV? Going down this road and trying to construct an image of the sort of state, or states, that the Jacobites might have created in Britain is an important exercise, because it allows us a glimpse into the mental world of the Georgians who were petrified by the prospect of a Jacobite victory; therefore, an imaginary reconstruction of what a Jacobite Britain might have looked like can give us a better understanding of why people opposed it so vehemently. (If anyone wants proof that contemporaries really did speculate about the nature of a Jacobite future, have a look at Daniel Defoe’s And What If the Pretender Should Come?, published in 1713.)

Moreover, a totally rigid adherence to the random survivals that constitute what we call the ‘historical record’ – what Thomas Carlyle, a century and a half ago, rightly called ‘dry as dust’ history – has led many historians to fall into the trap of believing in a teleological vision of the past, which comes to be seen as an inevitable progression towards a particular outcome. The Whig and Marxist interpretations of history are classic examples of this, but so too are some of the more exaggerated manifestations of the doctrine of American Exceptionalism and (here I’ll agree with Sansom, up to a point) some of the ways in which the histories of Scotland, Ireland and Wales have been mangled to serve particular agendas. When writing the ‘medieval’ section of Britannia’s Dragon, for instance, it became clear to me that the traditional picture of poor, weak, divided Wales facing inevitable defeat against the far more powerful English juggernaut is a false construct, created by historians who saw Welsh history exclusively in terms of an unequal relationship between just two clearly defined modern countries, England and Wales, and projected that relationship back into the past. (Not just Welsh historians with chips on their shoulders, either; the idea of the inevitability and rightness of English expansionism still has a powerful influence on English attitudes to history, including a markedly malevolent one on the extreme right.) In fact, the story of Anglo-Welsh relations from about 900 to 1400 needs to be seen in the broader context of the whole Irish Sea, with the complex power balance between the northern Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, the southern one of Deheubarth, England (itself not as monolithic as sometimes assumed), the Dublin Norse, the native Irish, the Manx, the Scots and above all the Norse in the Hebrides, being critical to Welsh prospects of remaining independent, and the Battle of Largs (1263), when the Norse of the Isles were decisively defeated by the Scots, as a crucial factor in indirectly determining the fate of Wales. One of my favourite books of last year, which I mentioned on this blog almost exactly a year ago, was Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms, a brilliant study of some of the lost states of Europe, which took the line that there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about those states’ disappearance and the survival of the ones which we have today, arguing that the obsessive concentration of historians on the development of the surviving modern states alone seriously distorts historical realities.

Of course, there are dangers to alternative history, too. At the more harmless end of the scale, the internet is full of discussion forums, Wikis and so forth, where people with too much time on their hands create elaborate edifices of the imagination; for instance, while researching Britannia’s Dragon I came across a staggeringly detailed account of the ‘Royal Welsh navy’ (yes, complete with aircraft carriers and submarines), the Wales in question having successfully regained its independence under Owain Glyndwr in the fifteenth century. But it’s only a relatively short step from such innocuous pastimes to preferring the alternative history to the real one; witness the ‘Confederate’ mentality which can’t really accept that the South lost the Civil War, or the ‘Braveheart’ school of Scottish history. (OK, another point where I don’t entirely disagree with C J Sansom.) And that, in turn, is only a relatively short step away from the conspiracy theory mentality which holds that what we’re experiencing is the false, alternative history, while the real truth of what happened in key events – JFK, 9/11, etc etc – is being kept from us.

I thought I’d finish with the one and only piece of alternative history I’ve ever written; or at least, written to date, as putting this blog together has whetted my appetite to write more! This was the opening of my essay on ‘James II, William of Orange and the Admirals’, published in By Force or By Default? The Revolution of 1688-9, published in 1989.

Imagine an alternative 5 November 1688. Almost at the moment that the vanguard of William of Orange’s invading army sets foot on the sands of Bridlington Bay, the mastheads of the English fleet are sighted, closing rapidly in line of battle from the south-east. The Dutch fleet, trapped between the enemy and a lee shore, and hampered by the need to defend several hundred transports clustered in the bay, struggles vainly to gain sea room. The battle is short, sharp, and decisive; by nightfall, most of the Dutch transports are ablaze and the shattered remnant of the escorting fleet is heading in disarray for Holland, bearing aboard it a sadder, wiser and disheartened Prince of Orange.

When news of the crushing victory reached Whitehall, James II gave orders for a Te Deum to celebrate the triumph of his fleet and the preservation of his throne. Provincial noblemen returned, dispirited, to their estates, and prepared to draft loyal addresses congratulating the king on his victory; colonels hastily burned incriminating correspondence and ordered their regiments to give three huzzahs for King James and the Prince of Wales; Anglican clerics agonised over drafts of sermons which would try to show that such a clear manifestation of God’s providence was not proof that He was, after all, a Roman Catholic God; and generations of historians yet unborn were condemned to spend their professional lives considering just why James II had such unanimous support from the political nation in 1688.

At Last It Can Be Told!

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Cue fanfare from massed ranks of trumpeters, plus assorted Welsh male voice choirs…

I can finally reveal the really exciting news that I’ve had to keep under wraps for several months. My e-book publisher, the fantastic Endeavour Press, is launching a new traditional publishing imprint, Endeavour Ink…and I’m one of the authors on their launch list! You can find out more about this terrific new venture, and see what illustrious company I’m in, here and here.

First and foremost, huge thanks to Richard Foreman and the team at Endeavour for showing such faith in me – I certainly hope to be able to repay it. Along with my agent, Peter Buckman, we had quite a bit of discussion before Christmas last year about the nature and time period of the new set of stories I’d develop for Endeavour Ink, but in the end, we settled on something that we’re all very happy with. Personally, I can’t wait to get started on writing the first of the three linked stories that Endeavour Ink have commissioned from me (and have, indeed, already done a fair bit of research and planning for it). So without further ado…

The new stories will have a very new setting for me, namely the Tudor age. Having said that, this is, in many respects, very familiar turf indeed: in my ‘previous life’, I taught the Tudors to A-level students, and to much younger schoolpupils, for many years, so I think I’ve got a pretty strong grounding in the period. In terms of naval history, of course, it doesn’t get much more seminal, and the timeframe I’ve chosen for the three stories reflects that. The first story takes place in the mid-1540s, so it’s hardly a major spoiler to reveal that it might just include the sinking of a certain ship*…and similarly, the third story takes place in 1588, so no prizes for guessing which major historical event provides its primary focus.

No, not that one
* No, not that one

But the famous events serve a second purpose. They provide the backdrop to the story of one family, drawn from one particularly remarkable, haunting, and very real place, whose members serve at sea throughout the period. They live through the trauma of profound religious change, experience times of great political turbulence, are riven by the horrors of war, and fight an enemy more terrible and relentless than anything the French or Spanish can throw at them. They encounter some of the great historical figures of the period, from Henry VIII to Francis Drake. Above all, they play their parts in the rise of the English ‘navy royal’ under Henry and his daughter, ‘Gloriana’, Queen Elizabeth I. So it’ll be a big change from the Quinton Journals, both in terms of period and theme.

If all goes well, I’ll be writing the first of the new Tudor stories in the second half of the year. In the meantime, I’m finishing off the new Quinton title, The Devil upon the Wave, and will then be working on the new academic book on naval ideology, 1500-1815, that I’m co-editing with Alan James and Gijs Rommelse. So 2017 is shaping up to be a pretty busy, but hopefully very rewarding, year!