I’m currently committed principally to producing the second and third books in the Kermorvant series, which will probably take me into 2024. Quite what happens after that is in the air at the moment, with much depending on my publisher’s view of the sales figures. In the medium term I hope to return to the Quinton series with an adventure set in 1668-9. This has actually been written – one of the plusses from the UK’s COVID lockdowns! – and will probably be self-published as and when time to do so becomes available.
I’m currently finishing a big non-fiction project that I’ve been working on intermittently for 20 years or so – a history of the fascinating Stepney family of baronets from my home town of Llanelli, creators of the magnificent mansion Llanelly House. I’ve alluded to them in various blog posts over the years, but here’s a little taster from the current draft (and thus subject to change if and when the book is published)…
Over the centuries, Stepneys were often to be found as close friends of the great and the good, and rather more often, of the dubious and the downright bad. Family members were intimate friends of politicians from Charles James Fox to David Lloyd George via Gladstone, Disraeli and even Karl Marx; of poets from Congreve and Sheridan to Tennyson and Dylan Thomas; of princes from King James VI and I to the Prince Regent and his brother, ‘the Grand Old Duke of York’. Queen Victoria regarded one of them as markedly disagreeable, even somewhat alarming. They had memorable encounters with the likes of King Frederick the Great and the Emperor Napoleon. One served with the Duke of Wellington, another was a close friend of Marshal Blücher, a third was an eyewitness to the Charge of the Light Brigade. The godparents of the Stepneys included heirs to thrones, Grand Dukes, and royal princesses. They were painted by Reynolds and Millais, and several of them liked to believe that they had inherited Van Dyck’s artistic talent (somewhat optimistically, it has to be said). The family produced one reasonably important poet, and one appallingly mediocre one; family members married one moderately famous (but staggeringly eccentric) novelist, and one of the greatest tennis players of all time; and Llanelly House was the birthplace of a Stepney descendant who largely defined both athletics and rowing as modern sports, staged the FA Cup Final, and wrote the modern rules of boxing. Ultimately, too, the Stepneys became one of those very rare aristocratic families, like Earl Grey and the Earls of Cardigan and Jersey, whose names have entered the English language. But even in this exclusive company, the name of Stepney stands alone: for in the twenty-first century, it is the only one that is a byword to over a billion people, even if only a very few of those live in the British Isles, where the name originated.
The Stepneys of Llanelly House refused to follow the herd with a stubbornness that bordered on sheer perversity. When others of their rank saw the land as the only fitting occupation for gentlemen, and certainly for baronets, the eighteenth-century Stepneys were in trade. When others saw election to Parliament, or nomination as their county’s High Sheriff, as the be-all and end-all of their ambitions, the Stepneys largely eschewed such positions. When others were clearing inconveniently adjacent villages or laying out parklands to ensure that their family seat was as far from the madding crowd as possible, the Stepneys developed theirs in the very middle of a town, with a front door opening directly onto the common highway. When the Glorious Revolution ejected the Catholic King James II, three single-minded Stepney girls decided it was the perfect time to become nuns. When, several years after the Battle of Culloden, the Jacobite cause lay in ruins, the incumbent Stepney baronet named one of his ships after Bonnie Prince Charlie. The family’s singularity was such that, in God-fearing Victorian England, one of the heads of it could claim ‘all the family were atheists’, and was perhaps epitomised best by the last of the original baronets, who insisted on wearing the light summer fashions of his youth during the depths of winter five decades later: an outfit that included a truly bizarre hat, which was regarded as one of the sights of London. Moreover, in an age when the Welsh squirearchy were widely despised as alien, Anglicised and Anglican absentee landlords, entirely antipathetic to the aspirations of the working classes they exploited…the heir to the Stepney estate was a personal friend of Karl Marx, and one of the leading lights in the early days of the Communist movement. His brother, perhaps inheriting a little of his sensibility, went out of his way to keep his tenants in their homes when many of his social equals and superiors were evicting theirs en masse. Finally, when, in the 1930s, the local authorities used every underhand strategy they could think of to prevent the opening of a family planning clinic in Llanelli, the Stepney squiress allowed one to be established in Llanelly House, the family’s historic mansion – despite the fact that she had converted to Roman Catholicism several years earlier.
There is always a very fine line between singularity and perversity, and the Stepneys and some of their descendants strayed over that line rather too often for comfort. Admittedly, this was not always their fault; for instance, relatively few respectable landed gentlemen of Victorian England can ever have been thrown out of a pub window by a vicar, but one owner of the Stepney estate achieved this unlikely distinction. The Stepneys and their kin often seemed to be on the cusp of greatness, but somehow never quite attained it. In generation after generation, members of the family displayed a rare talent for self-destruction and eccentricity that bordered upon the downright aberrant…
* Unfairly, the rules ended up being named after his rather more connected friend, the Marquess of Queensberry.