J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Historical research

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 3: Or, Getting It Wrong and Getting It Right

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My original intention for this week was to do a ‘straight’ factual outline of the careers of the three most famous ‘tarpaulin’ officers of the Restoration period, the closely inter-connected Sir Christopher Myngs, Sir John Narbrough and Sir Cloudesley Shovell. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that there was a more important theme which their careers revealed. And for once, Wikipedia provides perfectly adequate outlines of their lives, which makes any repetition here superfluous: Myngs, the Commonwealth sea-captain who became an almost legendary ‘quasi-pirate’ in the Caribbean before becoming a knight and a flag officer, dying heroically during the Four Days Battle of 1666 (which will be the subject of the fifth Quinton novel); his protege Narbrough, who commanded a Mediterranean fleet against the Barbary corsairs in the 1670s before dying on a wild goose chase after a fabulous sunken Spanish treasure; Shovell, the protege of both, who became one of the most successful admirals of the long war with France after 1689 before perishing in one of history’s worst and most significant shipwrecks, the loss of the Association in 1707, which triggered the concerted campaign to discover a way of accurately determining a ship’s longitude. 

Writing twenty years ago in my first book, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy, from which this blog takes its title, I unconsciously perpetuated a myth about these three men. Pepys recorded how Myngs boasted of his father being a shoemaker and his mother a hoyman’s daughter, and at the time I accepted this at face value, noting how Shovell had started out as a captain’s servant – effectively the ‘cabin boy’ of popular fiction and pantomime – to Narbrough, just as Narbrough started in the same way under Myngs.

It was only after writing G&T that I got to know north Norfolk really well, spending a fair amount of time in the once-wealthy ports (albeit decayed even by the 17th century) along the coast: Burnham Overy, where Nelson later learned to sail, Wells, Morston (where I’ve done some of my own sailing), Blakeney, Wiveton, Cley, over to Salthouse and Cromer.  Fieldwork in these places revealed a very different story to that painted by Myngs, Pepys – and myself. Myngs, it transpired, was indeed the son of a shoemaker, but a well-to-do one who was based in the city of London, not the backwoods of Norfolk. His mother was the daughter of a well-off landowner who owned several ships based at Salthouse; she was thus only a ‘hoyman’s daughter’ in the sense that her father owned hoys. Christopher Myngs himself inherited a substantial house in Salthouse which still stands. Narbrough was from the tiny, decayed village of Cockthorpe just down the coast from Salthouse; he was probably related to Myngs as another Narbrough lived at Wiveton, even closer to Salthouse.  This Narbrough was married at Salthouse’s glorious church, where 17th century graffito sailing ships can still be seen, carved into the pews, and where the gravestone of Myngs’ daughter Mary is still extant. Shovell, in turn, was also baptised at Cockthorpe, but his father was from a well-off Norwich family and his mother came from the Cley merchant community. Shovell did indeed go into sea under Narbrough, just as Narbrough went to sea under Myngs, but in many respects this was as clear-cut a case of patronage among the well-to-do as the promotion of many of Charles II’s ‘gentleman captains’.

Therefore, it’s clear that tarpaulins like Myngs (and Sir Richard Munden, the subject of last week’s post) emphasised or exaggerated their humble origins, perhaps partly in order to make themselves more appealing to the wider public and to build personal legends around themselves. With the courtly connections and genteel mannerisms of the ‘gentleman captains’ under attack in Parliament and pamphlet literature from the 1660s through to the 1700s, stressing one’s humble background and unpretentious ways became an important means of giving oneself a distinct and populist character. For example, Sir William Booth, who became a friend of and source of naval information for Pepys in the 1680s, claimed that he spent three years sleeping on deck ‘with nothing over him but a tarpaulin, that his seamen might be the better contented to do as he did’ – an implausible claim (and Booth’s whole career reveals a man prone to exaggeration), but one that was clearly intended to impress Pepys, who was known to be sympathetic to the tarpaulins and antipathetic to Booth’s factional rival, the notoriously immoral gentleman captain Arthur Herbert, the future Earl of Torrington.

Thus the tarpaulins were aware of ‘spin’ and ‘image management’ long before modern marketing coined those terms. In fact, many ‘tarpaulin’ officers, like Myngs and Shovell, came from backgrounds that were arguably as respectable as those of many ‘gentlemen’; as I argued in Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, the key difference between the two groups was not social origins but career pattern. This is particularly apparent when one visits an area like north Norfolk, comparatively isolated from the rest of the country, dominated by a few great houses (Felbrigg, Blickling, Raynham), but otherwise characterised by tightly-knit, interrelated and intermarried mercantile communities in which lesser gentry could be found alongside families of humbler status. These tight networks immediately become apparent when one visits the graveyards of, and studies the monuments within, the superb churches that line the north Norfolk coast.

I suppose the moral of this story for historians and novelists alike is simple – nothing beats actual research ‘on the ground’. It’s possible to glean only so much from ‘mainstream’ books or manuscript sources. A sentence on a monument high on a church wall, or a paragraph in an otherwise dubious local history written a century ago by an enthusiastic amateur, or simply looking out over a landscape and suddenly realising the possible connections between person A in village X with family B over in village Y: all of these things can provide insights that one would never have obtained elsewhere, as well as providing real local colour and depth of description in both fiction and non-fiction. Plus of course this sort of fieldwork has the added advantage of justifying holidays in some lovely parts of the world!!

Finally, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers. This blog will return on 3 January 2012.

History and Fiction

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

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

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

Rules of Succession

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Tell Your Mother

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

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

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

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

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

Stepney 200

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

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

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

The Joy of Source

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I’ve encountered some writers who look upon research as a huge and daunting mountain that they have to climb before they can actually start the fun part, the writing itself. I look on it very differently, probably because I spent many years as a ‘proper’ research historian before I started writing fiction and non-fiction aimed at a general, rather than an academic, audience. Research can be huge fun – the thrill of discovering something previously unknown in some musty archive takes some beating, while actually handling the materials left behind by people from previous generations is often both humbling and moving. In that respect, I’m particularly fortunate that the two main projects I’ve got underway at the moment involve some particularly fascinating research and in some cases a revisiting of old friends. For example, the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight, is set in Sweden in 1666. I taught seventeenth-century Swedish history to several generations of sixth formers, and some of them still recall ‘the Swedish question’ with affection. (Choosing such an apparently obscure topic wasn’t just self-indulgence on my part, although it did fit nicely with my ‘must-teach’ topic on the 17th century military and naval revolution; there was a considerable element of cunning strategy involved, as the less frequented topics like Sweden often had ‘easier’ questions set on them, and it was easier for good candidates to stand out in a smaller field.) So delving back into the histories of the Vasa dynasty, of Sweden’s ‘golden age’ and her ‘Gothic fantasy’, of the enigmatic Queen Christina and her successors, has really felt like a happy revisiting of old acquaintances!

 

The same has been true of my parallel work on the new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. This has really taken me back to my roots, both geographically and in terms of source material. For example, I’ve been revisiting the medieval Welsh chronicles, which I last looked at seriously 30 years ago; my first ever published piece was actually not naval at all but a piece of early medieval history. But I’ve also been discovering all sorts of previously untouched topics and, for me, unfamiliar sources, ranging from articles in journals about Roman archaeology to nineteenth century newspapers and twentieth century pacifist tracts. Over the weekend I was looking at the 1901 census online. I’d used this when compiling my family history, but had never really worked on it systematically, so some of the results were at once interesting and alarming. The census was transcribed by prisoners, a fact that caused some controversy at the time, and although there’s been much discussion of the sometimes bizarre consequences among genealogists over the last decade, it had never really presented me with an issue. However, looking at the transcriptions of the returns for HM ships (as part of a sampling process to estimate the number of Welshmen in the navy at the time) has turned up some unsettling but also hilarious findings. The prize of the day goes to the hapless convict who transcribed the return for the sloop HMS Racoon, lying at Aden. Like many ships on foreign stations, the Racoon had entered a significant number of crewmen locally – listed on her return as ‘seedies’. The ship had a particularly interesting and eclectic mix, including Somalis, Sudanese and Portuguese Goans, but this evidently caused insuperable difficulties for the incarcerated transcriber. Thus ‘Socotra’ was rendered as ‘Scotland’, ‘Comoro Islands’ as ‘Romania’ (!), and my personal favourite, ‘Sierra Leone’ as ‘Sierra, Lancashire’. Conversely, he managed to transform the old Anglicised spelling of Caernarfon, ‘Carnarvon’, into the far more exotic ‘Carnaroon’. I’ll keep a lookout for any more howlers as I continue to work through the returns, but one wonders just how many unsuspecting individuals researching their family history and relying in the first instance on the online transcriptions have been thrown off track by the incompetence (or simple laziness) of inmates who make Norman Stanley Fletcher look like a Nobel Prize winner.