J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Naval historical fiction

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…

***

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!

How Not to Write a Tudor Novel

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A few months ago, I announced my exciting new project – three linked naval fiction stories, set in the Tudor period, which will eventually combine together to be published as one ‘traditional’ book by the splendid new imprint, Endeavour Ink. Since then, in addition to finishing off other projects, I’ve slowly been getting my research materials together, sorting out my ‘fieldwork’ expeditions, beefing up the back stories of the principal characters, fine tuning the plot, and, yes, typing ‘Chapter One’ – or, as it’s otherwise known, ‘the point of no return’. Very soon, it’ll be time to start writing in earnest.

No.

Before I get started properly, though, I suppose I ought to confess my misgivings about tackling something Tudor. Yes, I know the period – studied it at university, taught it to A-level for years, read countless fiction and non-fiction books about it, watched Keith and Glenda in their pomp, etc etc. So to say it holds no terrors is an understatement. But, of course, the Tudors are very much the comfort blanket of historical fiction: it’s the go-to period for many authors and readers alike, and it’s the obvious staple for any lazy TV producer thinking of making a historical drama, a documentary, or, indeed, a drama-documentary. So I’m very aware of the danger of falling into some of the weary old cliches, and the diametrically opposite danger of writing something that goes a bit too far in outraging those who actually love the weary old cliches. Just so we’re all on the same wavelength from the start, therefore, I thought I’d flag up some of the things I’m not going to do in these stories.

  1. There won’t be any wives. (Well, yes, obviously, there’ll be men in the story with wives, and some of those wives will be major actors in the narrative. But they won’t be Those Wives.)
  2. Especially not the second one.
  3. Nor her sister.
  4. No mental picture or word portrait of any of the characters I’m developing could possibly be interpreted in casting directions as ‘teen model’.
  5. People won’t talk like they’ve just strayed from the set of Eastenders.
  6. Or The West Wing.
  7. Or, umm, The Tudors.
  8. Still no.

    There won’t be dialogue like ‘Where the hell is the Spanish Armada? It should have been here yesterday’. (Real recent TV script, anonymised to protect the guilty.)

  9. There will be scenes in Scotland, but they won’t feature That Queen.
  10. Therefore, there’ll be no scene where That Queen has a totally invented meeting with That Other Queen (you know the one, redhead, virgin, bit feisty, blah blah).
  11. Religion won’t be an inconvenient add-on, paid lip service with the odd reference to God and a stray priest or a dodgy nun hovering in the background. It was centre stage for people at the time, and it’ll be centre stage for people in my narrative. (For more of my thoughts on this subject, particularly in relation to my current series of Quinton Journals, have a look here.)
  12. Whether you love it or you hate it, there’s only one Wolf Hall (leaving aside the two sequels, obviously – and could you just hurry up a bit with the second one, Hil? Thanks.) This will be a Cromwell-free zone, although now I come to think of it, there is one character that Mark Rylance would be brilliant for. And it won’t be written like that, either.
  13. Similarly, it’s not going to be Shardlake, so people won’t die in incredibly unlikely circumstances as a result of intricate conspiracies centred around one or more of Those Wives.
  14. …and it’s not going to be a Tudor version of Patrick O’Brian; for one thing, in the Tudor world, any character resembling Stephen Maturin would probably have been burned at the stake before breakfast.
  15. Above all, the cover won’t feature a headless woman in a nice dress. (Unless you’re not telling me something, Endeavour Ink.)

So, then, time to write the first scene in which King Henry VIII makes an appearance.

(Casting recommendation: Danny Dyer.)

Books. Beer. What’s Not to Like?

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It is a truth not universally acknowledged that Jane Austen brewed her own beer, so I have absolutely no doubt that, as she looks down upon all the events marking the bicentenary of her death, the great author would thoroughly approve of Open Book, the first ever literary festival in Hitchin. The strapline, ‘Books, Beer and Banter’, tells you at once that this isn’t going to be one of ‘those’ sorts of festival – i.e. the highbrow intellectual kind, with great authors being interviewed in reverential tones by eminent journalists before a hushed, respectful audience. Open Book is going to be informal, lively, and, yes, fun, and I’m delighted that I’m going to be a part of it!

No. Just – no.

Open Book grew out of the relatively recently formed Society of Authors Hertfordshire group, to which I belong, despite being an interloper from over the Bedfordshire border. It’s being held on Saturday 29 July at the excellent British Schools Museum in Hitchin, which is well worth a visit in its own right. (Having said that, it’s somewhat troubling that many things which were features of my own schooling are now considered museum exhibits…) My talk is called ‘Don’t Mention Jack Sparrow: the Best (and Worst) Sea Stories’, and will give my take on the maritime fiction genre – its history, the reasons for its appeal, and, yes, my own highly personal choices of ‘the good, the bad, and the ugly’. Obviously, I’ll be referring to my own work, but my ‘top five’ of best sea stories won’t include any of my own books – although it will be a bit idiosyncratic and unexpected.

One of the good things about Open Book is that it’ll be a bit of a family affair, as my partner Wendy, the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed, is also speaking at it. Her first book, Great Minds and How to Grow Them, is about to come out, and she’ll be talking about some of the ideas contained in it. As the book’s blurb puts it, ‘Wendy is joint chief executive of the Education Media Centre. An award-winning education journalist, she has spent her career at the Guardian, the Independent, and has edited the Times Educational Supplement. She cares passionately about the role of parents in developing the learning of their children’. She’s co-authored the book with her old friend Deborah Eyre, an academic who’s one of the acknowledged authorities on high performance learning, so it’ll be an absolute must for parents keen to give their kids the best possible chances to succeed, and for those who are interested in enhancing their own learning.

At £4 a ticket, with under 16s getting in free, Open Book is incredibly good value for money. As the strapline suggests, there’ll be beer, there’ll also be a barbeque, and there’ll be plenty of other fun things taking place. So if you live within range of Hitchin, why not put 29 July in your diaries?

The Devil Upon the Wave – Teaser Trailer

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To mark the publication by Endeavour Press of the new Quinton title, The Devil Upon the Wave, I’m delighted to provide a treat for my loyal readers and followers of this blog – namely, the first few pages of the book.

***

Here, Painter, let thine art describe a story,

Shaming our warlike island’s ancient glory:

A scene which never on our seas appear’d,

Since our first ships were on the ocean steer’d.

Make the Dutch fleet, while we supinely sleep,

Without opposers, masters of the deep.

 

Anon., Fourth Advice to a Painter (1667)

 

*

‘By God,’ says he, ‘I think the Devil shits Dutchmen.’

 

Sir William Batten, Surveyor of the Navy; words reported by Samuel Pepys in his diary, 19 July 1667

 

 

PROLOGUE

The Gunfleet Anchorage

October 1671

 

‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’

Tom Butler, who uttered these words, did not look like a religious man. The pursed lips, formed into a permanent kiss, and the grey bags beneath his eyes gave him the look of a libertine; and, every now and again, if the fancy took him, that was what Tom Butler was, sometimes for months at a time. In faith, then, he was not really a religious man at all. But his pronouncement as we stood at the stern, watched the men on the yard unfurling the main course of the Elsinore Merchant to catch the strengthening south-westerly breeze, was as solemn as any by a bishop. It led me to wonder which lord he meant: the Lord on high, or the lord who stood before me. Religious he might not be, but a lord Tom most certainly was, despite the rough seaman’s shirt and breeches that he and I both wore as disguise. Indeed, one day, if God willed it, he would rule an entire kingdom. For Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, was son and heir to the Duke of Ormonde, the vice-king of Ireland.

Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, by Sir Peter Lely (National Portrait Gallery)

‘A fair wind for it, Matt. A fine breeze to carry us over to avenge England’s greatest shame. Just as they had a fine, fair breeze for it four years ago.’

‘Amen to that, My Lord Ossory.’

I looked out over the waist of our ship. To all but the very keenest observer, she would appear an innocent flyboat, a merchantman with her course set for Rotterdam. Yet that one solitary keenest observer might note that by the standards of innocent merchantmen, her crew were somewhat brisk. The course was sheeted home a little too efficiently, the ship’s head steered a little too precisely. The crew on deck was distinctly large by the standards of any such innocent merchantman, making a voyage to Rotterdam; and that was without counting the two hundred soldiers and seamen concealed in the hold. True, the Elsinore Merchant was as low in the water as a ship notionally carrying a cargo of salt from Maldon could be expected to be. But she carried no salt: instead, her commodious hold also contained enough weaponry and ammunition to sustain a small army, and a full set of canvas, enough to outfit one of the largest men-of-war in the world.

‘You still think it’s an insane scheme, Matt?’

My Lord of Ossory knew me too well. We had known each other for years, since the days when we were both penniless exiles in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. We had both married Dutch women; and, if anything, our wives were even better friends to each other than we were.

‘Then why am I here, Tom?’

‘Ah, well, Matt Quinton, there’s the rub. Why are you here? This was my insanity, God help me – mine alone. To bring her back to the haven from which she was taken. To bring her back in triumph. To avenge the humiliation. To redeem England. To exculpate our king. My idea. My folly. If God so wills it, my death. But why are you here, Matt?’

I looked out. To larboard, the low, featureless shores of Essex and Suffolk were beginning to recede behind us. To starboard, there was only the gently swelling sea, dotted with some small hoys, flyboats and ketches, under a grey spring sky. A sea that led to the mouth of the Maas, and the harbour of Rotterdam, where the Elsinore Merchant was notionally bound. But to reach Rotterdam, the ship would have to pass through the haven of Hellevoetsluis: or, as English seamen knew it, Hell-vote-slice. That harbour contained many ships, but only one of them mattered to Englishmen. Only one ship burned a word into English hearts, just as Calais was said to have been burned into the heart of Bloody Mary.

And that word was:

Chatham.

I smiled. ‘You know the reason, Tom. You were in Ireland, but I was there.’

Yes, I was there. I could still remember the heat on my face from our burning ships. I could recall the shame I felt at the sight of the Dutch flag flying proud from the ramparts of Sheerness fort. I remembered the brutal humiliation that our country had suffered. That I had suffered: the very personal crosses which I bore from that fateful summer of 1667. And that was why I sailed with Tom Butler now, on a scheme so insane, so suicidal, that any man of reason would have rightly decried it as the brainchild of lunatics.

Our collective madness began in high summer, some three months earlier, almost exactly four years after the catastrophe at Chatham, in a high room: a dark, stifling chamber in the round tower of Windsor Castle, atop its vast, overgrown mound, the Thames and Eton College just visible through smears in the grime caking the tiny windows. For some unaccountable reason, the king was thinking of making Windsor his permanent summer residence, rather than doing what any rational man would have done, namely, deciding it was better to stay in Whitehall after all and tearing down the entire rotting pile.

Windsor Castle in 1670

Tom Butler and I were standing over a table, looking down upon a chart of the mouth of the river the Dutch called the Maas. Across the table from us stood a tall, dark, ugly man wearing a simple shirt and a large black wig. If anything, Charles Stuart, King of England, was scrutinising the chart even more intently than we were.

‘There are almost no guards, Majesty,’ said Tom. ‘A few elderly marines. Some ship-keepers. No more. And of course, the Dutch will not be expecting such an assault.’

‘But they will still have men-of-war in the roadstead,’ I protested.

‘A thirty-gunner or two, perhaps,’ said Tom, confidently. And only one thirty–gunner will be more than sufficient to blow us out of the water, I thought. ‘That’s what our intelligencers suggest. Otherwise, their fleet will be laid up for the winter. What ships they’ll have in commission will be far to the north, at Texel and the Helder.’

I thought of objecting, but the king nodded vigorously, and I knew better than to challenge the royal nod. Yet this was strange. Indeed, it was strange beyond measure. Charles the Second, normally the most practical and sceptical of men, was not raising the objections that jostled within my head, each squabbling for precedence over the other. Objections that would usually have issued from his royal mouth, long before they reached mine.

Charles II by Mary Beale, 1670

‘You could rig her within an hour, while holding off the Rotterdam militia?’ said the king.

‘Jury rig only, Majesty, but enough to get her out into the roadstead. Then, a simple matter to take her out as far as our escorts. If you give us a brace of fourth rates, that is.’

‘But—’ I began.

‘The day will be chosen carefully,’ said Tom. ‘A spring tide. Sufficient for even her great draught.’

‘But the wind, Tom,’ I said. ‘All depends on an easterly, or a northerly, in that roadstead.’

And there, of course, was the great, terrible flaw in Tom Butler’s plan. It may be that the Dutch would be unsuspecting enough to believe that the King of England would not attempt such a thing. It may be that the defences were as weak as Tom believed them to be. It may be that we could erect jury rig in an hour. It may be that only a hundred or so men would be able to take to sea a ship usually crewed by eight hundred. It may be that the tide would be right. It may be that a million angels could dance on the head of a pin.

But nothing on this earth could determine the wind.

I looked at the king. I had known Charles Stuart for many years now, and knew him as most men did: the arch-cynic, the libertine, the fornicator. I also knew him as a consummate seaman, who could handle a helm as well as any pilot, and design a hull as well as any master shipwright. I knew the other Charles Stuart too, the one that fewer men saw, the brutal, vicious, amoral creature that would readily destroy hundreds of lives with the stroke of a pen. But I did not know the Charles Stuart who spoke now.

‘We shall trust in God,’ said the king, with the simple, unarguable finality of a martyr on the way to the stake.

That unsettling certainty, that uncharacteristic display of faith from the least religious monarch ever to occupy the throne of England, won over even me, Matthew Quinton, brother and heir of the Earl of Ravensden, scion of a family that, with only a very few exceptions, had never been noted for its piety. And that was how I came to be standing on the deck of the Elsinore Merchant with my old friend Tom Butler, Earl of Ossory, bound for the Dutch coast, there to board, seize, and bring back to England, one ship, thereby most certainly triggering immediate war between the two countries.

But this was not just any ship. It was one of the greatest ships of all, which was towed away from Chatham four years before, in the most abject defeat the English crown had ever suffered.

So although I did not quite know why, I knew that I would fight, and if necessary die, for this most impossible of causes: to bring back our king’s flagship, towed out of the Medway by the Dutch, to England’s eternal shame.

We would rescue the Royal Charles, and redeem our country.

 

So just what ‘very personal crosses’ does Matt Quinton bear from the summer of 1667? And what befalls the desperate mission to retrieve the Royal Charles? You’ll have to get hold of a copy of The Devil Upon the Wave to find out!

 

The Royal Charles at Hellevoetsluis in 1672, by Abraham Storck

Amsterdam Good Time, Part 1

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And so it continued. Not content with fireworks, rowing contests, schoolchildren’s chain-making competitions, and exhibitions galore, it was finally time for the historians to have their four-penn’orth about the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Medway, which was why I spent last weekend in Amsterdam, attending a conference jointly organised by the Naval Dockyards Society and the Vrienden van de Witt.

Marginally too large to smuggle aboard the Eurostar

In truth, I don’t need much persuading if a trip to Amsterdam is in the offing. I’ve loved the place since I first went there, well over thirty years ago, when I was working on my doctorate. I knew I could hardly work on seventeenth century naval history without seeing things from the Dutch side, so I swiftly became well acquainted with the Rijksmuseum, the Scheepvaartmuseum (the Dutch national maritime museum), and the great churches, not to mention many rather less renowned landmarks. One of these was a little bar which floated my boat for some unfathomable reason, and to which I return every time I’m in Amsterdam, including this one. It’s nothing special – indeed, in some respects, it’s a bit insalubrious – and it hasn’t actually changed at all in the thirty plus years since I first went there (possibly one of the reasons why I like it), but it’s very central, never particularly full, and always seems to be playing exactly the music I like, i.e. almost nothing written since The End of Music, which, of course, took place in approximately 1990. And no, I’m not going to tell you what it’s called or where it is, in case you all start going there. But it provides a haven for a breather between my regular destinations, which on this trip, included the likes of the Rijksmuseum, the Oude and Nieuwe Kerks, and the Kok secondhand bookshop, plus a new discovery, the wonderful ‘secret’ Catholic church of Our Lord in the Attic.

Turner Prize? More like the Turnip Prize, IMHO

(The visit to the Oude Kerk was a bit frustrating, largely because it currently contains what has to be one of the daftest ‘modern art’ installations I’ve ever encountered – and there’s a lot of competition for that title, says Mr Grumpy Old Man. This one consists of what are essentially large rectangles of gold wrapping paper laid out over the floor, thus obscuring many of the fascinating grave slabs and forcing visitors to play a game of human chess, i.e. having to move to the right or left if someone else is approaching along the same vertical line.)

I’d not been to the Rijksmuseum since its huge refurbishment some five years ago, and was duly impressed by the new look. But like all great international museums, visiting it is still a slightly frenetic experience, thanks principally to the vast tour parties on their ‘see the Rijksmuseum in five minutes’ excursions – and invariably, that means setting up a colossal siege line in front of The Night Watch. However, that’s only marginally less hectic than the rest of the floor devoted to the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, the seventeenth century, which unfortunately includes the naval displays, my principal target. Still, most tourists are significantly smaller than me, and only relatively few needed to be hospitalised as I manoeuvred myself into poll position in front of the glorious works of art by the van de Veldes et al. However, I’m not sure that the Rijksmuseum refurbishment has been kind to the naval material. The sternpiece of the captured Royal Charles, for example, now hangs above a door, and it’s not possible to get as close to it as it was in the old incarnation, where it was alongside a mezzanine. But otherwise, it’s still possible to wander through huge swathes of the museum, including, for example, the ship models room, and encounter very few people, while of course, I’m not going to complain too much about any national museum that devotes an appropriate amount of space to naval history. (Are you listening, British Museum?)

‘Ninety-nine!’ (This caption is respectfully dedicated to all members of the 1974 British Lions touring party)

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Tomorrow, I’ll blog about the conference programme itself. There was one massive timing glitch during it, though – but it most certainly wasn’t the fault of the organisers. When I sat down after giving my paper, I checked my emails, and came across a piece of information that I wish I’d known about earlier, so I could impart it to the audience. (OK, yes, that’s an euphemism for ‘indulging in shameless self-publicity’.) This was the news that the new Quinton novel, The Devil Upon the Wave, had become available on Amazon that very afternoon. Naturally, the book focuses heavily on the Dutch attack on the Medway, but it also places Matthew among the defenders of Landguard Fort as they try to beat off yet another Dutch onslaught, and also takes him to sea, albeit this time aboard the Dutch fleet, where he confronts a terrible dilemma and a huge personal tragedy. Several real historical characters make ‘cameo appearances’, among them King Charles II, Samuel Pepys, and Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, while fans of the broader Quinton family may welcome the return of the enigmatic Uncle Tris, Matt’s outspoken elder sister Elizabeth, his dour Dutch brother-in-law Cornelis, and, of course, his feisty wife Cornelia. As a special treat and ‘teaser trailer’, next Monday’s post on this site will provide a free preview of Chapter One – and for a book set against the backdrop of the events of 1667, it’s most definitely not what you’re going to expect!