J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Historical sources

You Can Fool Some of the People Some of the Time (Redux)

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The current media storm about ‘alternative facts’ put me in mind of a post I first published on 1 November 2011, when this blog was read by two men, a dog, and a vole called Kevin. So I thought I’d re-post it now for a rather wider audience, especially as it chimes neatly with some of the themes I’m exploring in my new book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy. In that, I deal with some of the instances where Samuel Pepys peddled his own ‘alternative facts’, many of which have been accepted uncritically by pretty much all writers. But as I’ll be demonstrating in Kings of the Sea, several important measures for which Pepys claimed the credit, and which historians and biographers have invariably been prepared to accept as being his responsibility, were not actually his doing at all, or not entirely so – and one entire source which he produced, and which has always been treated by historians as ‘gospel’ evidence for what happened in the navy, is, in fact, seriously flawed and misleading. So the book is likely to get quite a few people’s backs up…

However, back in 2011, I raised some questions about the veracity of the other great diarist of the Restoration period, John Evelyn, after first talking about a book I was then reading as part of my research for Britannia’s Dragon. Time to fire up the DeLorean, Marty!

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Just finished two books on my Kindle – Roy Hattersley’s biography of Lloyd George (which showed the old goat to be even more randy and devious than I’d ever realised) and Anthony Dalton’s Wayward Sailor, an exposé of another brazen old rogue, the bestselling sailing guru Tristan Jones. Despite a schmaltzy and overblown prose style, Dalton does a meticulous job of dissecting Jones’s wildly exaggerated claims, proving that many of the experiences he recorded in his wildly successful ‘non-fiction’ books were either partly or wholly invented. I’m particularly interested in Jones because he claimed to be Welsh (although the ‘Llangareth’ where he claimed he grew up doesn’t exist) and to have served in the Royal Navy throughout World War II, being torpedoed three times and being present at the sinking of the Bismarck, among many other adventures recounted in his wartime ‘memoir’ Heart of Oak. Unfortunately, as Dalton shows Jones was actually born in 1929, not 1924 as he claimed, and thus could not possibly have served in the war; in fact, he did not join the navy until 1946. Heart of Oak is thus a complete invention, unlike some of the books about his sailing exploits which are at least vaguely grounded on truth. Yet remarkably, it continues to fool some. By coincidence, I was recently sent a review copy of a new book on the Royal Navy in World War II by an eminent authority in the field, and was amazed to discover that the author was citing Heart of Oak as a valid historical source. (I’ll save the author’s blushes, at least until my review appears in print!) We all make mistakes in our research, and I’ve sometimes been as guilty as anyone of not checking sufficiently on the provenance of a source, but even a simple check of Wikipedia would have revealed the extent of Jones’s invention.

This put me in mind of an unsettling discovery I made a few years ago. As far as I know no-one has ever queried the authenticity of John Evelyn’s diary,  but among the seventy-odd entries I wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography were those on two men whom Evelyn knew well, Edward, Earl of Sandwich (the patron of Evelyn’s friend Pepys) and Thomas, Earl of Ossory, one of the most charismatic figures at the Restoration court (and one of the nicest, although he’s sadly little known these days). In both cases, Evelyn recounted stories about the end of the men’s lives that were simply not true. The diarist describes a meeting with Sandwich shortly before the latter joined his flagship, the Royal James, which was destroyed by a fireship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672). He told Evelyn that he ‘was utterly against this war from the beginning’, and  regarded his own prospects fatalistically: when he parted from Evelyn, ‘shaking me by the hand he bid me good-bye, and said he thought he should see me no more … “No”, says he, “they will not have me live … I must do something, I know not what, to save my reputation”’. It’s perfectly possible that Sandwich spoke to Evelyn in those terms, but if he made the statement that he was against the war from the beginning, he was either lying outright or cleverly concealing one very important fact. Unknown to Evelyn or the earl’s subsequent biographers, Sandwich was the principal English signatory of the secret Anglo-French naval treaty of January 1672, which set out the arrangements for the conduct of the joint naval campaign against the Dutch. He was a principal architect of the war that killed him, not an opponent of it.

Of course, Sandwich might have dissembled deliberately by telling Evelyn he was against the war; the conflict was unpopular, and Sandwich might have been covering himself in the event of a future parliamentary enquiry, such as that which had followed the previous war. But my inner alarm bell really started to ring when I moved on to research Ossory. In 1680 he was appointed Governor of Tangier, a posting widely regarded as a death sentence. According to Evelyn, Ossory spoke to him privately of his doubts on 26 July, bemoaning the fact that he believed he was being sent out solely so that Charles II could prove to the next Parliament that he, the king, had done all he could to save Tangier by sending out his best and most popular general; in other words, Ossory’s reputation would be destroyed in a mission that could not succeed simply to serve the king’s own cynical political agenda. Still according to Evelyn, it was at a dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall on the same evening that Ossory fell ill with the severe fever, probably typhus, that was to kill him. Although Ossory and Evelyn might well have had the sort of conversation described by the diarist, Evelyn’s recollection of the sequence of events is seriously faulty. The earl had been stricken by the fever on about 18 July, and on the 26th he was in the second day of a delirium that lasted until his death.

So what explains Evelyn’s apparent inventions? Of course, he might simply have got the dates wrong, especially if he was writing up several days of his diary at once; but this seems unlikely in Ossory’s case at least, given the nature of Evelyn’s entries on the days before and after the 26th. But it seems curious that Evelyn should have claimed sole privy knowledge of the last thoughts of two of the most eminent warriors of the age. Throughout history, there are those who have claimed to be the last witnesses to the final hours and thoughts of a great figure, often as a way of emphasising their own importance in the history of their age. (Witness the weight given to the reminiscences of Hitler’s last secretary/bodyguard/etc, and more recently to those of Colonel Gaddafi’s driver.) If Evelyn did invent or exaggerate Sandwich’s and Ossory’s statements, he must surely have done so in the belief that his diary would eventually be published, and that such publication would present him as an important figure who was privy to the innermost thoughts of the great. Which begs an unsettling question – what else in Evelyn, or in many other sources that historians have always accepted as gospel, might be at least ‘economical with the truth’? At least we now know where we stand with Tristan Jones, who brazenly invented vast tracts of his life; or at least, we should do!

The Kings of Post-Truth

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OK, right, all this ‘post-truth’ malarkey, then.

Now, you know you’re never going to get out-and-out politics in this blog, for reasons I might fully elucidate one day. But for various reasons, I’ve been getting a little peeved with all this media hype about ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’, and so on and so forth. To me, much of it seems to be, to a certain degree, yet another case of historically illiterate journalists (and even more historically illiterate users of social meejah) suddenly waking up to a phenomenon that they assume to be new, but which has actually been around forever and a day. The always fascinating Many Headed Monster blog recently demonstrated how fake news was endemic during the British civil wars, for example, while the dear old Daily Mail has been shamelessly peddling colossal whoppers (and influencing the outcomes of elections with them) since at least the Zinoviev Letter in 1924. Back in my previous life, I used to show my GCSE students the famous ‘before and after’ pictures of Trotsky alongside, and thus clearly both physically and politically close to, Lenin – a fact so inconvenient to Stalin that he got his proto-photoshoppers to simply remove Trotsky from the picture, long before an icepick removed him from the bigger picture too. So the principle has been around since the serpent spun a bit of fake news to Eve; the only thing that’s ‘new’ is the method of delivery (after all, as vehicles for news delivery and political debate, Facebook and Twitter are little more than shiny versions of 1640s newsbook-fuelled pub arguments), its potential reach, and arguably, the greater gullibility of its audience. All of this was grist to the mill of a man who would undoubtedly nod sagely and mutter plus ça change about all this ‘post-truth/fake news’ debate, namely the genius who literally wrote the book on the subject, Mr George Orwell.

Now you see him, now you don't
Now you see him, now you don’t

But there needs to be one big caveat to all this: what we assume to be absolutely cast-iron ‘facts’ often turn out to be anything but. To demonstrate my point, I want to look at one seemingly unassailable set of ‘facts’, namely the names and dates of the Kings and Queens of England.* How on earth can these be ‘dodgy’ in any shape or form, you might reasonably demand?

The catalogue of English monarchs is probably the best known chronological sequence of heads of state in the world – so much so, indeed, that there are sad people out there who have, as one of their claims to alleged fame, the ability to reel off the names and dates of all the monarchs since 1066. (Raises hand tentatively, then swiftly puts it back down again.) But once you start to unpick it, these supposedly certain ‘facts’ look rather more shaky than they might first appear to be. Take, for example, the civil war during the 1130s to 1150s, known to history as ‘The Anarchy’ (and just how subjectively loaded a description of an epoch is that?). Just who, exactly, decided that only King Stephen would be regarded as the true monarch for the entire period between 1135 and 1154, despite the arguably superior claim to the throne of the Empress Matilda – who, indeed, effectively controlled most of the country for some of that time? How is it that Matilda’s place in the list, and thus her claim to be England’s first female monarch, has always been denied, while the ‘readeption’ of Henry VI in 1470-1 – which is probably just as debatable as her ‘reign’ – has usually been included? Might we be dealing with a teeny weeny bit of Victorian misogyny here, heavily influenced by a large dash of Shakespeare?

(Similarly, Lady Jane Grey was once left out of the list entirely, but now seems to be a permanent fixture. But just about the one thing that distinguishes her from other so-called ‘pretenders’ who were proclaimed monarch in opposition to the supposedly rightful heir – say, Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck, or the Duke of Monmouth – is that, unlike the others, she and her supporters controlled London, if only for nine days. So is the inclusion of Jane in regnal lists merely yet another blatant example of metrocentric bias?)

If you haven't read it, leave this website immediately and never darken my door again
If you haven’t read it, leave this website immediately and never darken my door again

The regnal list fascists have also struggled with the notion that it might be possible to have two monarchs simultaneously. True, they make grudging allowance for William and Mary, although I seem to recall that in my childhood, the latter was often airbrushed out of the record as comprehensively as Trotsky, despite the hugely important work she did in her own right (as I discovered when I touched on aspects of her role in directing naval affairs after 1689). Sellars and Yeatman memorably satirised the intellectual hurdles inherent in the concept of joint monarchs by combining the two into a single androgynous creature called Williamanmary, alongside a picture of a crowned fruit (‘England ruled by an Orange’). But if William and Mary are allowed, why not Philip and Mary a century and a half earlier? Philip of Spain was given full monarchical status by his wife – coins, acts of Parliament, etc, were all made in the names of Philip and Mary jointly. So surely writing Philip out of the record is nothing more or less than a manifestation of Protestant xenophobic bias against the man who would later despatch the Spanish Armada against these shores? Similarly, Henry II had his eldest son, another Henry, crowned in his lifetime, to prevent future succession disputes, but ‘the Young King’, as he was known, never features in the lists, perhaps because ‘Henry II(A)’ is just too difficult for some to get their heads around.

Let’s take another example. When he was restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II and his ministers categorically proclaimed it to be the twelfth year of his reign, thus effectively declaring that the Interregnum had never legally happened at all, and that thus, more importantly, all of the legislation passed during that time was invalid. But at some subsequent point, somebody, identity unknown, sensibly decided to ignore the Royalist interpretation of what had happened between 1649 and 1660 – thus making a political judgement on which set of ‘facts’ should be accepted, and which should not. One need not add, of course, that for Jacobites – and there are still a few out there – every ‘regnal date’ since 1688 has been a fiction, and we are currently living in the eleventh year of the reign of His Majesty King Francis II, who fills in the time before his inevitable and glorious restoration by fulfilling the onerous duties of the patron of the Bavarian Dachsund Club.

'Don't call me Mrs Tudor'
‘Don’t call me Mrs Tudor’

The familiar sequence of names of the royal houses is equally contentious. The late, great Tudor historian Cliff Davies caused a minor furore in academic circles a few years back – not to mention much wailing and gnashing of teeth among historical novelists and the makers of countless BBC dramas and documentaries – by pointing out that England’s most famous dynasty never actually called themselves by the surname at all, partly because of a degree of shame about the name’s humble Welsh origins, partly because they actually saw themselves as reuniting the disparate strands of the old Plantaganet royal line. (The abstract is here, although the full article is behind an armed Mafiosi checkpoint – sorry, academic publisher paywall.) Indeed, he argued, hardly anybody else in the ‘Tudor age’ ever used the word ‘Tudor’, either. Even in our times, there’s been a nagging uncertainty about what the surname of the current royal family actually is: the brilliant Netflix series The Crown convincingly portrayed Prince Philip’s fury at not being able to bestow his own name on his children, although that name (Mountbatten) is itself an invention, only four years older than the prince himself, as is his wife’s maiden name of Windsor. Still, Mountbatten-Windsor is probably preferable to trying to conjure a suitable moniker out of the coupling of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg with Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.  

One final point. Who, exactly, decided that the list of ‘English’ monarchs should only commence in 1066, when the English royal line was comprehensively overthrown by a Norman invader? What about all the Saxon and Danish Kings of England before that date? True, it suited all the Norman Edwards to number themselves as though the likes of Edward the Elder never existed – but why on earth have all subsequent historians, makers of lists, and setters of pub quizzes, bought into that hugely political reinvention of history by a bunch of Anglo-French toffs?

There we have the nub of the problem: the list of Kings and Queens of England is not the string of unassailable set-in-stone facts that it appears to be, but an arbitrary set of choices based on political prejudices and unchallenged orthodoxies. And if that is the case, and the facts themselves are potentially so badly flawed, then ‘post-truth’ thinking in such cases can actually be a positive, forcing us to reassess the very building blocks of history from first principles.

To conclude, then, to say that history is written by the winners is only partly correct: history is, and always has been, written by those who decide who the winners actually are.

 

 

(* Very similar issues apply to the regnal lists of Scotland and Wales. Quite apart from the ‘grey areas’ in the former – e.g. Edward Balliol – the whole Scottish royal sequence has been politically charged since 1603, and not just because of the Jacobite dimension referred to earlier. My Scottish friends rightly get very upset when their King James VII is referred to indiscriminately as ‘James II’, while postboxes newly adorned with the royal cipher of ‘Elizabeth II’ were firebombed in the early 1950s by those who knew rather better than Anglocentric Post Office apparatchiks that Scotland never had a previous Queen Elizabeth… As for Wales, the traditional description of Llywellyn ap Gruffydd, killed in 1282, as the last native Prince of Wales, is very much a construct of English conquest. His brother Dafydd was proclaimed Prince after Llywellyn’s death, and could be legitimately regarded as such until his own death in the following year, while the proclamation of Owain Glyndŵr in 1400 muddied the waters even more. Indeed, the pendulum has now swung the other way, and it’s become ‘politically correct’ in Wales to refer categorically to the latter as the last prince – a line taken even in such a seemingly innocuous context as the Christmas quiz on S4C, the Welsh TV channel.)

Noah’s Archive

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So there are conferences which you go to and think ‘meh’, conferences which take place on a Saturday and you’ve completely forgotten what they were all about by Monday, and the conferences that fire you up and leave the building thinking you’re Thor or Wonder Woman (delete as applicable) and that the bad guys had better take cover. The event held at the National Maritime Museum last week, under the innocuous title of a ‘Maritime Archives Initiative’, fell into the last of these categories.

Now, ‘maritime archives’ might not sound like a superhero-generating subject. In fact, they’re absolutely at the heart of what people like myself do, and one of the great strengths of the conference was that it brought out the diversity and importance of collections the length and breadth of Britain. John McAleer of Southampton University gave the keynote, talking about some of the archives he’d used for his research, primarily on eighteenth century slaving. His point that superb material could be found in such unlikely locations as Winchester and Carlisle really rang a bell with me; I’ve worked in Cumbria Record Office in Carlisle too, which contains a terrific amount of seventeenth century naval material, and also in equally unlikely places. Lincolnshire Record Office, for example, contains some of the best material on the actual conduct of naval warfare during the Anglo-Dutch wars to be found anywhere, together with some completely unique material on the operations of Charles II’s royal yachts, which I’ve mined extensively for my new book, Kings of the Sea (more of which next week). Over the years, I’ve found terrific material about Welsh history in Scottish archives, and vice-versa. The lesson is simple – don’t assume that everything of importance is in the obvious places, and be prepared literally to go the extra mile to explore your subject fully.

We then had six presentations about different archives that hold maritime material – the Trinity House archives at London Metropolitan Archives (an old haunt), Cornwall Record Office (ditto), Tyne and Wear Archives, the SS Great Britain, the Ballast Trust (which saves the archives of Scottish maritime companies, e.g. shipbuilders) and Staffordshire Record Office. The last of these might sound to be an unlikely contributor, but I can personally testify to the importance of the archives there, and it was nice to see on the screen a few familiar old friends from the papers of Lord Dartmouth, who commanded both the expedition to demolish Tangier in 1683-4 and the fleet assembled to defend against William of Orange’s invasion in 1688.

The afternoon was taken up with group brainstorming sessions. These were all essentially concerned with getting archivists and researchers collaborating more closely – and, indeed, encouraging collaboration with other institutions as well (the speaker from Tyne and Wear had regaled us with a wonderful story of how the previous director banned archives staff and museum service staff from even walking down the same corridor in their shared building, let alone collaborating with each other). Some old bugbears inevitably came up – “why can’t there be a single national reader’s ticket?” – and ways of raising public awareness were aired, one message being that in this day and age, Twitter and Facebook are absolutely essential for any institution. Perhaps the principal theme of all, though, was the need to try and improve the standardisation of online cataloguing, to make it easier to track down relevant material. Plenty of problems with this one, but rather fewer potential solutions, although enhancing the National Archives’ ‘Discovery’ catalogue and/or Exeter University’s ELMAP project were suggested as as ways ahead. Above all, though, there was great enthusiasm to make the conference the start of a regular process of engagement, not just a one-off. Let’s hope this proves to the case – or, to put it another way, Archivists, Assemble!

(Sorry.)

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By the time I post next week’s blog, I should have sent off to the publisher my new non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, so the post will provide the first detailed preview of it – plus a first look at the cover!

Game of Hats

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Back after a terrific weekend at the Historical Novel Society conference in Oxford. Yes, there were big guns – Melvyn Bragg, Fay Weldon et al – but as always at such events, the information and ideas coming out of the panel sessions were more important, and the networking was more important still. In the latter sense, it was great to meet lots of old friends again, including some from far afield (special nods to Gillian Bagwell and Margaret Muir, the third member of the ‘naval novelists’ splinter group with myself and Antoine Vanner!), and to meet plenty of new ones, too. I won’t launch into a self-indulgent bout of name-checking, but hello and thank you to all! I had the proverbial one job, and that was to chair the panel on the Great Fire of London, which I shared with Chris Humphreys and Andrew Taylor. The three of us had all taken very different approaches to the Fire in our books, and our really receptive and engaged audience asked some thought-provoking questions, for example on the comparisons between this event and other great historical fires, such as the notorious ‘Nero’s fire’ in Rome – and we were fortunate to have Margaret George, author of the hugely successful ‘psycho-biography’ biographies of Nero, Henry VIII et al, in the room with us to contribute to the discussion.

There’s always one dominant theme that seems to emerge out of these conferences, and as far as I was concerned, the theme that came out of this one was that hardy perennial, the relationship between historical fiction and writing ‘proper’ history. As regular readers of this blog know, this is a subject of ongoing interest to me, but it occurred to me that it tied into the recent social media ‘storm in a teacup’ about Rebecca Rideal’s excellent new book, 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire, and the subsequent interview she gave to The Guardian, which seemed to upset a small number of grumpy academic historians. As I was driving back to Oxford, it also occurred to me that these debates could be summarised very nicely by doing a riff on the famous Barker, Corbett and Cleese sketch about class: imagine Cleese’s bowler hatted character as a tenured university academic with a PhD, Barker as a ‘popular’ historian writing for general readers, and the cloth-capped Corbett as a historical novelist. I invite you to make your own reimaginings of the script.

In real life, of course, some historical novelists, and quite a few popular historians, will be making a lot more money than the academic historians – which, one suspects, might have something to do with the slight but still visible green-eyed tinge to some of their grumpiness. One thing that was really striking at the conference, though, was the number of people who are both ‘proper’ historians (yep, PhDs and all) and yet also write historical fiction. In my own case, of course, I’ve worn all three hats in my time, and am currently wearing them simultaneously – novelist promoting latest title, popular historian completing new book for a general audience, and academic historian co-editing a weighty tome for a small audience. So all of this is distinctly tongue-in-cheek, but as I might be one of very few people who can look at it from all three perspectives, I thought I’d try to summarise them in table form.

Apology 1 – as creating tables in WordPress appears to be a task which makes negotiating Brexit look simple, I’ve had to set this up as best I could, so it might not look quite right on all platforms.

Apology 2 – I have good friends in all three of these lines of work, and none of what follows is based on any of you. Honest. (Note: this does not apply if you are Sir Arthur Bryant.)

 

 

ACADEMIC HISTORIAN

 

 POPULAR HISTORIAN HISTORICAL NOVELIST
Purpose: the theory Make as many people as possible interested in your subject; tell an important story; be as true as possible to the past

 

 Make as many people as possible interested in your subject; tell an important story; be as true as possible to the past

 

 Make as many people as possible interested in your subject; tell an important story; be as true as possible to the past

 
Purpose: the reality 1/ Tick boxes on CV, with institution, government, etc

2/ Because of [1], keep job

 Make lots of lovely money Become the new Dan Brown or J K Rowling. Failing that, claim to be ‘following one’s dream’, even if the dream involves pot noodles and buying your clothes at Asda

 
Previous career Child. Generally speaking – journalist, peer of realm, or spouse of publisher You name it. However, in most cases, ‘previous career’ is also still ‘current career’.

 
Publisher Pays no advance and minimal royalties, produces book of 200 pages, charges £90 per copy, does almost no marketing. Book never remaindered; secondhand copies become so rare that wars are fought over them Pays an advance and royalties (be still my beating heart), produces book of 200 pages with lots of nice pictures, charges £20 per copy, does lots of marketing. Book still gets remaindered after 6 months, copies in Oxfam for 20p within a year.

 

 A ‘publisher’…please…oh God, please…
Articles Writes articles solely for like-minded colleagues in obscure peer-reviewed journals behind paywalls run by companies (founders: A Capone, V Corleone) which charge £50 to download a PDF of a 15-page article that was published 40 years ago

 

 ‘Country Life, dahling.’ YOU THINK I’VE GOT TIME TO WRITE ARTICLES??
Prose style ‘What is this term “prose style” of which you speak?’ Short sentences. Colourful adjectives and adverbs. Find as many gruesome or sexy anecdotes as possible and shovel them in on an industrial scale

 

 Whatever a potential publisher wants it to be
References Has vast footnotes name-checking as many other historians as possible, ostensibly because it’s ‘engaging with the debate’, in reality so they’ll give you nice reviews

 

 Has short endnotes to prove that this is a REAL HISTORY BOOK and that I’VE READ MORE STUFF THAN YOU Agonising about whether or not to include a historical note at the end of the book. Will it shatter the illusion for my readers? Oh God, do I have any readers??
Research method Does a lot of research in original sources Does a lot of research in original sources* Does a lot of research in original sources

 
Writing method Fills in gaps between the sources by using own imagination, but calls process ‘interpretation’ Fills in gaps between the sources by using own imagination, but calls process ‘empathy’

 

 Fills in gaps between the sources by using own imagination, but calls process ‘imagination’

* Yes, I know plenty of popular history books that are just potboilers based on other potboilers. But goodness knows how I’d have fitted in a fourth column to cover the rubbish that should never have been penned by any writer of any description, ever. 

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A couple of mystery guest posts coming next on this blog – an extra one at the end of this week, which puts a pretty remarkable historical ‘find’ online for the first time ever, and a really special and important one next week, which will be of particular interest to my Welsh followers. Watch this space!

And finally, a late correction – it now seems that I had good friends in all three lines of work…

 

A Darker Angel

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Last week, I posted the first few pages of the fictional plot of Death’s Bright Angel as a ‘teaser trailer’ for the book’s forthcoming publication. But as I’ve mentioned before, this title is actually ‘two books in one’, with the second part being a detailed historical analysis of the evidence surrounding the outbreak of the Great Fire. This standalone essay, as long as many an e-book, publishes for the first time much previously unknown evidence about the outbreak, and raises some uncomfortable and provocative questions about the accepted story of how the Great Fire began.

So am I saying that the Great Fire of London was, or could have been, started deliberately?

You’ll have to get your own copy of Death’s Bright Angel in order to find out! But in the meantime, here are the first few pages of the historical investigation.

 

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON:

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE FIRE-RAISING WATCHMAKER, THE ELUSIVE SEA CAPTAIN, AND THE QUEEN OF SWEDEN’S TAILOR

A Historical Investigation

 

Until I started researching and writing Death’s Bright Angel, my knowledge of the Great Fire of London came from a combination of general knowledge, facts learned at school, TV programmes, Pepys’ diary, and a couple of books on the matter, read more than a decade ago. I suspect, if pushed, most people would admit similar. However, I’d also taught the subject quite often, usually to twelve year olds (Year 8, in British education parlance), frequently employing ancient BBC educational programmes with shockingly cheap special effects. It’s a subject that goes down well with schoolchildren – lots of drama and destruction, vivid first-hand accounts, even some humour (‘he buried a cheese?’), and best of all, nobody dies; well, hardly anybody. Unsurprisingly, the Great Fire is a mainstay of the National Curriculum in History for schools in England and Wales, and some ten children’s books about it have been published since 1995 alone. Within the same period, three full-length, fully referenced adult studies of the Fire have also gone into print.

I duly read or re-read all three of these books, and several earlier ones, as research for Death’s Bright Angel, and as I did so, felt a mounting disquiet. All described mid-seventeenth century London, the actual course of the Fire, and its various aftermaths, competently enough – sometimes quite brilliantly. But when it came to the aspect in which I was most interested, the different theories circulating at the time to explain why the Fire began, and especially the confessions, trial, and execution, of the supposedly simple-minded French watchmaker Robert Hubert, alarm bells rang.

All recent books on the Fire explicitly derive large parts of their accounts – of the theories of the Fire’s outbreak in Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane – from a single earlier secondary source, The Great Fire of London by Walter George Bell. This was originally published in 1923 and republished several times since, and the principal primary source upon it relied, William Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, was published between 1809 and 1826, incorporating earlier material from editions dating back to 1719. All the modern books accept without question Bell’s judgement that ‘this fact (the accidental outbreak in the bakery) does not admit of doubt… the judgment that must result from a calm consideration of the evidence, [is] that the Fire in its origin was due to carelessness, and was not criminal’.

What of it? Surely all that Bell (a journalist and astronomer, incidentally, not a historian) did was follow the orthodoxy rapidly accepted by enlightened contemporaries like Samuel Pepys, the orthodoxy allegedly followed by the Lord Chief Justice who had actually sentenced Hubert and which, when partisan fervour and religious bigotry eventually died down, became accepted by most of the general public, too? The Great Fire began by accident; as I indicated in the note at the beginning of this book, Robert Hubert’s confession to having started it was written off almost immediately, as it has been ever since, as the rambling of a madman who did not even arrive in London until after the Fire began.

Even so, I wanted to see exactly how Bell reached the conclusions upon which all recent books about the Fire depend. I also wanted to examine the source material about Robert Hubert in a more forensic way than has been attempted before, and to see if there were any sources that had been completely ignored in previous studies. This might seem a curiously intensive research strategy for a work of fiction, but I knew from the outset that the storyline for Death’s Bright Angel would only have sufficient drama if it posited arson, or strong suspicions of arson, as the cause of the Great Fire. To make the book as convincing as possible, I knew I had to investigate that possibility as rigorously as I could.

In other words: once a historian, always a historian.

 

Want to read more? Death’s Bright Angel is available for pre-order through all the usual channels!

Highways and Byways of the Seventeenth Century: The McEnroe Moment

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Busy, busy, busy! So a slightly modified reblog of an older post this week, this one from pretty much exactly four years ago, in April 2012. 

Every now and again, a historian comes across a snippet of information so bizarre that he or she reacts by silently quoting a certain illustrious tennis player – ‘you cannot be serious!’. (Or at least, that would be the case for historians of my generation; those born after, say, 1980, might prefer the current de rigueur exclamation of choice in tweets and text messages, ‘WTF?’) It’s often said that there’s a considerable similarity between the instincts and working methods of historians and policeman, and the discovery of such a snippet at once transforms even the most mild-mannered historian into Inspector Morse, relentlessly pursuing the solution to the mystery at the expense of all else – perhaps abandoning rather more pressing assignments in the process.

I have to confess that I’m particularly prone to this tendency. It was a ‘McEnroe moment’ that set me off on the ten year odyssey to explore the mysterious ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600, which eventually culminated in my book Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the Gowrie Conspiracy, in the process putting other projects on the back burner, acquiring a couple of bookcases’ worth of Scottish history, and fearlessly conducting research in archives, castles and pubs from Perth to Carmarthen via Maidstone and North Berwick to the Loire valley. (OK, perhaps the pubs weren’t strictly essential to the parameters of the project, but I always seemed to obtain some of my best insights in them.) I’ve been intrigued for a couple of years now by such oddities as why the Earl of Southesk killed the Master of Gray in the distinctly unlikely surroundings of Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, in 1660 – the subject of a talk I give to local history societies – and whether or not Joanna Bridges, who lived at Mandinam, Carmarthenshire, in the 1640s and 1650s and married the famous Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor, was really the illegitimate daughter of King Charles I and the Duchess of Lennox. So yes, when it comes to being intrigued and distracted by a historical fact that comes from a fair way across left field, I’m your man.

On Easter Saturday, I had another McEnroe moment. We were exploring Ely Cathedral – one of my favourites – when I came across a plaque next to a floor brass. I hadn’t seen this on previous visits, so presumably it’s fairly new. The plaque proclaimed that the subject commemorated in the brass, Humphrey Tyndall, an Elizabethan Dean of Ely, had been – wait for it – heir to the throne of Bohemia. Now, the idea of a middle-ranking Anglican cleric being next in line to a central European kingdom has pleasing echoes of The Prisoner of Zenda (one of my favourite books) and of the (probably apocryphal) offer of the throne of Albania to the cricketer C B Fry, but it seemed a distinctly implausible one. For one thing, I’d taught the Thirty Years War for long enough to know that by 1619, at least, the throne of Bohemia was elective, that the King thereof was in turn one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, and that the Habsburgs, the Emperors from 1440, always ensured that they occupied the Bohemian throne themselves to ensure their next heir was elected to the imperial crown. (By coincidence, the last Habsburg heir to the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Archduke Otto, last Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, died only last year (i.e. 2011), becoming the last Habsburg to have a state funeral in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, followed by interment in the Capuchin Crypt, one of the spookiest places I’ve ever visited.) When I started doing serious historical research in the early 1980s, exploring a mystery one stumbled across on an Easter weekend would have had to wait until the opening of the library the following Tuesday, but nowadays, of course, I have but to emulate my lazier ex-students and make straight for Google and Wikipedia!

A Wikipedia entry on the Tyndall family states:

When King Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, she brought with her first cousin, Margaret of Treschen, daughter of Litvaticus, Duke of Tescen in modern Silesia by his wife Elizabeth, sister of Charles IV and daughter of John the Blind, King of Bohemia. This lady married Sir Roger de Felstead (or Bigod), of Felstead in Essex, a standard bearer at the coronation of Richard II and their daughter, Margaret, married Sir Thomas de Tyndall of Talsover and Deane…when the House of Luxemburg died out with the death of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1368–1437)…Sir William Tyndall became one of the heirs to the elective throne of Bohemia. John Nichols (an 18th century antiquary) relates that a delegation of Bohemian boyars were sent to England to offer him the throne but that he refused, the Habsburgs succeeding to a throne they held (with one interruption) until 1918. There was an oral tradition at the University of Cambridge that Humphrey Tyndall, brother of Sir John Tyndall of Mapplestead and uncle (or great uncle) of the eminent deist Dr Matthew Tindal, was again offered the throne by the Protestant party in Bohemia in 1620. This Humphrey was Dean of Ely and President of Queens’ College, Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. Humphrey refused, saying that “he had rather be Queen Elizabeth’s subject than a foreign Prince”, leading to the ill-fated Frederick V, Elector Palatine (married to Elizabeth, daughter of James I and ancestor of the present Queen) becoming King for a year – a development that was a principal cause of the thirty years war.

This account set various alarm bells ringing. ‘Oral tradition at the University of Cambridge’ sounded distinctly dubious – even leaving aside my Oxford bias and any bitterness about the Boat Race (still as true in 2016 as it was in 2012 – ed.)  – while Tyndall was hardly going to turn down a throne in 1620 (actually 1619) on the grounds that he wanted to remain Queen Elizabeth’s subject when she’d been dead for seventeen years…and Tyndall himself had been dead for five. Another online source says that the offer was made in 1591, which is equally implausible as it was half way through the reign of the King-Emperor Rudolf II – and the idea of the Bohemian Protestants preferring an obscure Fenland cleric like Tyndall to a well-connected prince like Frederick V simply beggars belief. A little more Googling and Wiki-ing casts further doubt on the story. It took me a while to track down ‘Litvaticus, Duke of Teschen’, but this must be Przemyslaus I Noszak, Duke of Cieszyn, duke from 1358 to 1410. He was an important figure at the Imperial court and brokered the marriage between Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia. So far so good for the Tyndall story. But the duke’s wife (sorry, I’m not typing that name again…) was not the sister of the Emperor Charles IV and daughter to John the Blind, King of Bohemia; although she was named Elizabeth, she was the daughter of  Bolesław, Duke of Koźle-Bytom. Charles did have a sister Elizabeth, but she died when only a few months old.

So it seems as though Humphrey Tyndall wasn’t descended from Bohemian royalty; but this begs the question of why so many people, perhaps including himself, believed that he was. It might have been a simple confusion of one fourteenth-century Elizabeth with another, part of a mangled family legend that had been passed down for two hundred years and then mangled again by a couple of eighteenth century antiquarians. But the much-derided antiquarians of the Georgian and Victorian ages sometimes had access to sources that are now lost, and I’ve learned many times not to dismiss their statements out of hand simply because I can’t find anything else to corroborate them. Will the story of Dean Tyndall and the throne of Bohemia be worth a more thorough investigation? Possibly; but probably not. For one thing, I don’t think I can cope with the spellings!