J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

books by J D Davies

The Ensign Flutters Again

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I’m delighted to announce that my new publisher, Endeavour Press, has just brought out Ensign Royal, the Quinton prequel ‘e-story’, which was first released by Old Street two and a half years ago, and which is now available again on Amazon. To mark the occasion, I’m re-blogging the post I wrote to mark the original publication. This is a precursor to some very exciting news about my future plans, including those for the Quinton series, which I hope to be able to announce next week – so watch this space!

For some time now, I’ve been keen to expand the Quinton canon by writing some shorter stories which would be available exclusively on e-readers. There are several reasons for this:

  • Firstly, it will allow me to fill in some of the chronological gaps in the main series, and to explore elements of Matthew Quinton’s ‘back story’;
  • Secondly, it opens up the opportunity to have a greater variety of settings and plots – the main series is constrained to some extent by being perceived by booksellers and some readers exclusively as ‘naval historical fiction’, with all the preconceptions of what that genre should provide, whereas the e-format opens up, for example, the possibility of having stories set exclusively on land, and thus providing a much more rounded picture of Matthew’s life, times and adventures;
  • Thirdly, and above all, quite a number of readers have contacted me to let me know that they’d love to read such stories!
The Battle of the Dunes, by Lariviere
The Battle of the Dunes, by Lariviere

Ensign Royal is a prequel to Gentleman Captain, and deals with an episode alluded to both in that book and other titles in the series – Matthew’s first experience of battle, the Battle of the Dunes in June 1658. Matthew was then eighteen years old and an Ensign in the tiny royalist army-in-exile, marching with its much larger ally, the Spanish army, to raise the French siege of Dunkirk. This battle has always intrigued me: the royalist general, James, Duke of York, had been trained by the French commander, Marshal Turenne (on horseback in the picture), who in turn was the former comrade-in-arms of the Spanish commander, the Prince of Condé, who had rebelled against France’s ruler, Cardinal Mazarin. This tangled web of loyalties was further complicated by the fact that Mazarin, a prince of the Roman Catholic church, had entered into an alliance with the virulently anti-Catholic Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, who provided 6,000 New Model Army veterans to the army besieging Dunkirk – not to mention the fleet moored offshore to bombard the Spanish positions. Thus Roundhead and Royalist armies battled each other one last time, amid the sand dunes of Flanders.

Battle of the Dunes - note the Commonwealth squadron off the coast
Battle of the Dunes – note the Commonwealth squadron off the coast

The Battle of the Dunes, fought, ironically, on exactly the same beaches from which the British army was evacuated in 1940, forms the climax of Ensign Royal. But before then, Matthew has to undertake a dangerous mission to England on behalf of his enigmatic brother, the Earl of Ravensden. This puts him at the very heart of a dark conspiracy, the truth of which he learns only many years later during an unsettling encounter with the last relic of ‘England’s black legend’. But Matthew’s perilous escapades in England and during the Battle of the Dunes also lead to his first meeting with someone who will play a very important part in his life…

 

But I Still Never Read Reviews, Dahling

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A sort of semi-re-blog of an old post this week, one which first saw the light of day some three years ago. Looking back over it, I see that much of it still applies – I still look at my Amazon and Goodreads reviews only very rarely, unlike many fellow authors. This isn’t because I can’t take criticism: remember that I was a teacher for thirty years, so I became well used not just to criticism, but also to personal abuse and every swear word in the book (and that was just from the Headmaster). It’s partly a question of time, partly the factors outlined in the post that follows, partly an innate scepticism about the multiple fallibilities of the reviewing process; let’s not forget, for example, that Pepys, Tolstoy, Tolkien, Voltaire and George Bernard Shaw all reckoned Shakespeare was absolute pants. But every now and again, a review comes along that’s simply impossible to ignore, and that’s certainly the case when you get your first ever review in a national newspaper, as happened to me in The Times last weekend. For those who don’t want to register on their website for free access (you can do this up to the limit when the paywall kicks in), here’s the text of the review-

Death’s Bright Angel by JD Davies

There is a welcome return, too, for Captain Matthew Quinton of Charles II’s navy. JD Davies is an expert on the 17th-century navy, and his series about a gentleman captain in the Age of Sail has won him keen fans. In Death’s Bright Angel, Sir Matthew, the master of HMS Sceptre, is fighting in the continuing wars against the Dutch but he is becoming ever more uneasy because his orders compel him to burn civilian homes.

On his return to a plague-diminished London, he is charged with finding terrorists who threaten the fragile post-Civil War peace. This is 1666, and a small fire in the heart of London is about to turn nasty. Naval fiction is a crowded sub-genre in historical fiction, but Davies knows his subject and wears his knowledge lightly. Death’s Bright Angel is the sixth book in a series of real panache.
Old Street, 288pp, £8.99

OK, I won’t repeat the corny joke I made on Facebook about thinking that Real Panache was a Spanish football team…but seriously, huge thanks to Antonia Senior for praising the book, and the series, so highly!

And now, gentle reader, let’s travel back to May 2013, when Nick Clegg (who he? ed.) was still deputy prime minister, Ed Milliband (who he? Ed. Yes, that’s what I said…) was leading the Labour party, and people were still wondering when a British man would ever win Wimbledon again.

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A confession: I’m really not much good at many aspects of the self-promotional side of being an author. OK, I enjoy blogging as it gives me an opportunity to explore issues I simply can’t cover in the books and, yes, to have a good old-fashioned rant every now and again. Twitter is quite fun and informative, and bizarrely, there now seem to be over 600 people who want to know what I’m up to [now over 2,000], which suggests either that I come up with the odd interesting tweet every now and again or they’ve mistaken me for one of the many other J D Davieses out there (a big hello at this point to Jack over at @jddavies, erstwhile owner of an alpaca business in California; the J D Davies roofing and guttering business in Doncaster; and the slightly misspelt Belgian dance music legend J D Davis). Having said that, I guess I could have had many more followers by now, but so far I’ve been averse to automatically following people back, especially if they don’t really fit with my interests – so apologies to Californian life coaches and pizza takeaways in the Rhondda. (Don’t get me wrong, I love pizza, and I love the Rhondda, but it would be a bit cold by the time I got it back to Bedfordshire.) As for Facebook…sorry, but although I dutifully post updates every now and again, I really have had it up to here with photos of other people’s babies / dinner / cats / dogs / allegedly amusing posters (delete as applicable) and a privacy policy that’s as transparent as the admission criteria for the Illuminati.

One aspect of this deep-rooted aversion to what some might loosely term ‘the twenty-first century’ has been a reluctance actually to read reviews of my own books. Now, I know this makes me sound like some precious old stage lovey, as per the title of this blog, so I need to qualify the statement straight away. Obviously, I read what one might term the ‘big’ reviews – I was thrilled when Gentleman Captain got rare starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, for example, and these naturally appear on my website. I’m very grateful when authors whom I respect hugely, like Angus Donald, Dewey Lambdin, James Nelson and Sam Willis [since joined by Conn Iggulden], provide highly complimentary blurb for my books, and few things are nicer than getting emails from readers who’ve enjoyed reading the Quinton Journals. But I’ve never gone in for avidly looking at the reviews of my titles on, say, Amazon, and – whisper it softly – I only signed up for Goodreads last weekend, following a prompt from a fellow author. Consequently, I’ve never actually quoted praise or criticism of my books from emails, Amazon or Goodreads on, say, Twitter, unlike many of my fellow authors, despite the fact that the majority of reviews of my books on Amazon, for example, have been four or five stars. Whether this reticence to blow my own trumpet has been false modesty or downright stupidity on my part is probably for others to judge…

However, going onto Goodreads for the first time proved to be something of a Damascene moment for me. Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to see the ratings and reviews for every one of my books, and my initial reaction was one of crushing disappointment. What? Gentleman Captain only has 3.57 out of 5? Oh God, I’m a failure, I shall crawl back underneath a stone, drink a gallon of meths, sob gently and bemoan the injustice of it all. But then I started finding my way around the site, and realised pretty quickly that 3.57 is a perfectly respectable score. Some of my own favourite books from genres similar to my own have very similar ratings – for example, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s brilliant Captain Alatriste has 3.58, Robert Goddard averages between 3.3 and 3.9 for his many titles, while even Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander only just creeps above 4 (slightly below The Blast That Tears The Skies, in fact – although my score is from six reviews and his from 15,544…). Romeo and Juliet has 3.72, only just ahead of The Da Vinci Code, for heaven’s sake! Moreover, I remembered my teaching career and my reluctance to give any sixth form essay, no matter how brilliant, more than 18/25, on the grounds that [a] I didn’t want the young person in question to become over-confident and complacent [b] I’m a grumpy, miserly old Welsh Scrooge (for let’s face it, my fellow Cymry, we’re not a race renowned for our generosity). Similarly, as soon as I started rating books on Goodreads myself I found myself giving out four stars far more often than fives, so if others work on the same eminently sensible principle, it’s obvious that very many books are going to end up with three-point-something, given that some people out there are always going to give anything – even, say, Pride and Prejudice – one or two stars, just to be ornery (or, in the case of P&P, maybe because they’re disappointed that it turned out not to be the version with zombies).

I don’t intend to quote any of the reviews, not even the ones that say things like ‘What a great book! This brings the 17th century to life…perfect for the armchair seadog’, ‘Both more literate and more entertaining than the run of maritime historical fiction. Highly recommended!’, ‘Naval triumph…Probably the best “Hornblower” story I’ve ever read, including Hornblower. Deserves to be much better known and more widely read’ or even ‘Excellent…I’ve been an avid reader of naval fiction for ages and read many different authors. Many of the authors are inevitably compared to Patrick O’Brian, J D Davies is easily his equal in terms of erudition and storytelling. In fact in some ways he is better.’

Oops, sorry, guess I did just quote a few of them. Not quite sure how that happened…

To be balanced, though, I should point out that there are some less complimentary reviews out there too, although I’m still scratching my head over the one that lambasted my writing style (‘stilted’, ‘adverb laden’), my characterisation (‘some of them are simple caricatures, stick figures redrawn time and again’ – ouch) and pretty much everything else about The Mountain of Gold, yet this particular reviewer still gave it four stars and ended by stating how much he was looking forward to book three. I’m perfectly fine with the fundamental truth that no author is going to please all of his or her readers, all of the time, but in this case, I’d like to know just how badly I need to write a book to get five stars from this particular reviewer!

Of course, if any of my readers are inspired by this post to go onto Goodreads or Amazon to post additional five-star reviews of any of my titles, I’ll be eternally in their debt. No names, no pack drill, and above all, no sockpuppets.

The Real Gentlemen Captains, Redux, Part I

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In the lead-up to my appearance on 13 March at Weymouth Leviathan, Britain’s first maritime literary festival, I thought I’d reblog some of my very earliest posts on this site, from November 2011, about some of the characters who will be making appearances during my talk. Here’s the first of them!

People often ask me to what extent the characters in the Quinton Journals, especially Matthew himself, are based on real people. I thought I’d use my next few blog posts to introduce some of the real-life individuals whose careers in Charles II’s navy provided the inspiration for Matthew and some of his adventures; and yes, occasionally the lives of these officers provide a few clues to some of the story lines in future books of the series! In future blogs I’ll also go on to detail some of the ‘tarpaulin’ officers who provided the inspiration for the character and career of Kit Farrell.

Captain Francis Digby – Probably born in about 1645, he was the second son of George Digby, second Earl of Bristol, one of Charles I’s most important (if catastrophic) advisors during the Civil War. He went to sea just after the Restoration, aged about fifteen, and fought at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665 as a volunteer with Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red Squadron. In March 1666 he became lieutenant of the flagship Royal Charles, and his good service in that role during the Four Days Battle at the beginning of June led to his promotion to captain of the Fourth Rate frigate Jersey. His bravery is indicated by the fact that when the Jersey went in for repair after the St James’s day fight, Digby asked permission to go back to sea on another ship as a volunteer (a request rejected by the admiral, the grumpy old Duke of Albemarle). In 1667 he commanded the frigate Greenwich, which seems to have been given to him by King Charles II principally as a means of trying to restore the Digby family fortune, which had been ruined by the civil war. In 1668-9 he commanded the Third Rate Mountague in the Mediterranean. Digby’s manuscript journal for these commands, preserved at the British Library, reveals that despite his aristocratic background, he gradually became a highly competent seaman; on one occasion only his quick thinking prevented the fleet being wrecked on the North African coast.

Digby spent March and April 1672 in France, ‘fine tuning’ the naval agreement by which a combined Anglo-French fleet would attack the Dutch to fulfil the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover (1670). Digby met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and during the next few days had several meetings with the king’s chief minister, Colbert. Not surprisingly the French rejected out of hand Digby’s suggestion that their captains and ships should have English commissions and colours, on the grounds that ‘his Christian Majesty never could suffer his captains to take commissions but from himself’. Despite this and some other disagreements, Digby’s negotiations were complete by 12 March. After leaving Paris he undertook a tour of inspection to Brest and La Rochelle before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry. Digby was apparently somewhat disappointed by this, believing that he was already qualified to be a flag officer; indeed, if he had lived there is little doubt that he would have been an admiral before the end of the third Anglo-Dutch war, as several men junior to him were promoted to such rank during it. But on 28 May 1672 the Dutch under Michiel De Ruyter launched a surprise pre-emptive attack on the Anglo-French fleet as it lay in Solebay. The Henry was in the admiral’s division of the Blue Squadron, which bore the brunt of the fighting; the flagship Royal James was burned by a fireship and her admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, killed. The Henry had the next highest number of casualties in the squadron, with 49 killed. Francis Digby was one of them. He was buried at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, the mausoleum of the Russell family, Earls and later Dukes of Bedford; his mother was a daughter of the fourth Earl.

Digby was one of the many suitors of Frances Stuart, the model for the original image of ‘Britannia’ and later the Duchess of Richmond. Digby’s pursuit of her, like King Charles’s own, proved to be hopeless. He was said to have been driven to distraction by her ‘cruelty’, and after his death at Solebay Dryden wrote ‘Farewell, Fair Armida’, a poignant epitaph to unrequited love:

Farewell, fair Armida, my joy and my grief!
In vain I have loved you, and hope no relief;
Undone by your virtue, too strict and severe,
Your eyes gave me love, and you gave me despair:
Now called by my honour, I seek with content
The fate which in pity you would not prevent:
To languish in love were to find, by delay,
A death that’s more welcome the speediest way.
On seas and in battles, in bullets and fire,
The danger is less than in hopeless desire;
My death’s wound you give me, though far off I bear
My fall from your sight—not to cost you a tear:
But if the kind flood on a wave should convey,
And under your window my body should lay,
The wound on my breast when you happen to see,
You’ll say with a sigh—it was given by me.

Kernow bys vyken!

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Cornwall has had something of a mixed week.

On the plus side, there was the government’s decision to grant it national minority status. Now, whatever the legalistic merits or demerits of such status, there’s no doubt that Cornwall is, and always has been, a very different place. That was immediately apparent to me after I moved down there in 1979 to begin my first teaching job, at a school in Newquay. (We had a high truancy rate during the summer, but at least we know where everyone was: they’d be surfing on Fistral Beach. And that was just the senior management team.) As I wrote in a previous post, if my three years there taught me anything (apart from the fact that a pint of Guinness and Lucozade is a viable drink), it’s just how ferociously independent the Cornish are; a Cornwall vs Gloucestershire rugby match at, say, Camborne’s tightly packed old ground, is treated essentially as an international, with black and white St Piran’s flags waving everywhere and the strains of the ‘national anthem’, Trelawny, echoing from the terraces. There was the language, too, still all pervasive in place names and surnames (as my first class registers quickly demonstrated). Much of the language was actually quite familiar, as Cornish is very similar to Welsh, and I swiftly learned the single most important Cornish phrase of all – ‘non emmett’, literally ‘not an ant’, intended as ‘I’m not a tourist’ or, more pointedly, ‘Not English’. As readers of the Quinton Journals will probably know, I provided Matthew Quinton with a somewhat obstreporous Cornish crew in part as a tribute to the time I spent living west of the Tamar, and the names of several of them were drawn from former students, colleagues or acquaintances. I’ve also tried to work in snippets of the Cornish language from time to time – the latest book, The Battle of All The Ages, includes the first lines of the Lord’s Prayer in Cornish – while Gentleman Captain has a poignant funeral scene which culminates in the singing of the lovely old Cornish song, The White Rose.

Charlestown, Cornwall - my kind of harbour
Charlestown, Cornwall – my kind of harbour

But then, on the minus side, there was the BBC’s adaptation of Jamaica Inn. Auntie must have thought that this would tick all the boxes for prime time Easter viewing. Excellent cast acting their socks off? Check. Former Downton Abbey star? Check. Glorious scenery on Bodmin Moor? Check. Strong story by a bankable name, i.e. Daphne du Maurier? Check. And then it all went terribly wrong, with a torrent of complaints from viewers who simply couldn’t understand what the cast were saying. The Beeb grovelled, assuring the world that it was a problem with sound levels and not that the actors were mumbling. So the ‘sound levels’ were adjusted…and the complaints continued. But let’s be honest, shall we, all you Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells who complained to the BBC about the ‘sound levels’ on Jamaica Inn? Yes, some of the cast were mumbling, and no doubt the Beeb finds it easier to blame anonymous backroom techies than highly paid, precious luvvies delivering ‘naturalistic’ (aka unintelligible) performances. But on the whole, it seemed to me that there was nothing seriously wrong with the sound levels, or even with much of the delivery. Isn’t it more likely that many of you simply couldn’t understand the ‘Cornish’ / generic Mummerzetshire accents that the cast had adopted, but were too polite or nervous to say so? After all, these days complaining about ‘unintelligible’ accents is akin to being labelled a racist: and as a Welshman who still has to smile tolerantly at people’s ‘witty’ stabs at cod Welsh accents, which invariably come out as more akin to Bangalore than Bangor, I’d respectfully contend that I know what I’m talking about.

Before one could eat a pasty or a cream tea, the critics of mumbling had been joined by the historical accuracy brigade. Aargh, it’s the wrong type of plough / coach / hymn! They’re not reloading their pistols before firing them again!! It was interesting that these criticisms focused overwhelmingly on the terrestrial aspects: perhaps it’s a sign of Britain’s apparent ‘sea-blindness’ these days that few people seem to have picked up on the rather more fundamental plot holes in the maritime aspects of the story, e.g. how a crewman of a sailing ship in 1821 could guarantee that his vessel would depart exactly at a given time on a given day, or why wreckers would choose to operate in broad daylight, for goodness sake. Those who actually know the geography of Cornwall might also have boggled at some of the journey times implicit in the story: Jamaica Inn to the coast = short stroll over adjacent hill, rather than the actual distance, namely six or seven miles; getting from Launceston Gaol to Roughtor = quarter of an hour, tops (good luck with that one in a Formula One car, let alone on horseback). Of course, the BBC will respond by pleading dramatic licence, and I’ve used enough of that myself to sympathise, but there’s a very fine line between dramatic licence and laughably implausible, which itself is merely a fine line away from just plain wrong.

But all of this is really a very long-winded preamble to a plug for my appearance at the Penzance Literary Festival in July – to be precise, at 11.00 on Friday 18 July. I’m talking on Cornwall in naval history and naval fiction, so will be touching on the stories of the likes of Sir Richard Grenville and the Pellew brothers, as well as fictitious characters like Alexander Kent’s Bolitho and, yes, Matthew Quinton’s Cornish crew. It should be great fun, and if any of you are going to be in the area and fancy coming along, it would be terrific to meet you. While I’m down there, I’ll also look forward to a rare chance to revisit some of my old stomping grounds – maybe even ordering a pint of Guinness and Lucozade in the Jamaica Inn itself, and acknowledging receipt of same with a cheery ‘Proper job, me ‘ansum!’.

(And for those who don’t know, ‘Kernow bys vyken’ means ‘Cornwall for ever’. Matthew Quinton’s men shout it as a battle cry in The Blast That Tears The Skies, and will do so again!)

Cover Story

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Battle for All 1I’m delighted to be able to headline this week’s post by revealing the cover of the new Quinton novel, The Battle of All The Ages, which is number five in the series and is due to be published in the UK in June. Thanks to my publishers, Old Street, for doing such a tremendous job, and to Conn Iggulden for providing such a generous blurb. Our original contact was entirely unsolicited, as it turns out he’s a big fan of the series!

The cover art is Abraham Storck’s painting of the Four Days Battle of 1666, which forms the centrepiece of the book. Storck’s painting is held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and full details of it can be found on the museum’s website. The section shown on the cover shows De Zeven Provincien, the flagship of the great Dutch admiral, Michiel Adrianszoon De Ruyter, and the Royal Prince, flagship of Admiral Sir George Ayscue. The latter is aground on the Galloper Sand and will soon surrender; Ayscue remains the only British flag-officer to surrender in battle, and the loss of the Prince caused a sense of national shock that has been compared to the loss of HMS Hood in 1941.

The Four Days Battle followed a controversial decision to divide the British fleet. As I wrote in Pepys’s Navy:

In January 1666 France…declared war to fulfil long-avoided treaty obligations to the Dutch. The command of the British fleet for the 1666 campaign was given jointly to Prince Rupert and George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, but at the end of May they divided their fleet, with Rupert sailing off to the west to intercept a French fleet that was believed to be approaching British waters. The intelligence proved false, and on 1 June Albemarle found himself with 56 ships, facing the Dutch fleet of 86 under the brilliant Michiel De Ruyter off the North Foreland. The ‘Four Days’ Battle’ that followed was one of the great epics of the age of sail. Rupert rejoined on the third day with 25 ships, but after another day of fighting, the British fleet was forced to retire, having lost three admirals captured or killed…several thousand men, and ten ships, including the great Royal Prince.

Matthew Quinton and his ship are at the heart of the action, and as well as dealing with a superior Dutch enemy, he has to contend with problems among his own crew – notably the tensions between the seamen and the newly created Marine Regiment (the precursors of the Royal Marines), and the presence of an eccentric and unpredictable character with a special connection to the King. During four days of ferocious fighting, Matthew and his friends – the likes of Lieutenant Kit Farrell, the Reverend Francis Gale and Phineas Musk – are tested to their utmost limits.

In the second part of the book, Matthew is sent by the King on a dangerous mission to discover the truth about why the fleet was divided; was it treachery, incompetence or simple bad luck? In doing so, he finds himself regarded as an enemy in his own land, in a place with strong residual loyalties to the fallen Commonwealth; is forced to denounce a friend; and battles a mysterious enemy, the so-called Hell Hound. All the while, his thoughts are torn between these immediate dangers and developments far away, notably his wife’s sickness and the frantic efforts to repair the fleet so it can sail out again to gain revenge on the Dutch. The book culminates in the second great sea-battle of the summer of 1666, the St James Day fight, before Matthew finally confronts the real and unsettling truths about the division of the fleet.

As usual, The Battle of All The Ages is based closely on real events, particularly during the battle scenes, and a host of real historical characters make an appearance. These include King Charles II, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, General George Monck, the famous Dutch admirals De Ruyter and Evertsen, their British counterparts Sir Christopher Myngs and Sir Robert Holmes, and the notorious Restoration rake, the Earl of Rochester. Action at sea, intrigue, Restoration poetry, and a foul-tempered monkey – what’s not to like? And if you fancy a sneak preview, the first chapter will be available on my website in the near future!

The Dai is Cast

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All novelists have a secret fantasy.

Actually, it’s not terribly secret. It’s the cast list.

Yes, admit it, my fellow authors, you know what I’m talking about. That cast list. The one for the film of your book – the lavish Hollywood spectacular or BBC mini-series based on our purple prose, the prize that we all dream about. The films and series that will never, ever, get made, unless our names are… Well, you know who I’m talking about, although I should emphasise that this post was in no way inspired by the arrival on our TV screens of yet another historical epic – cum – soap opera, a veritable Dallas with codpieces, namely the BBC’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen. By coincidence, I provided a checklist for assessing such offerings a few weeks ago, so let’s see how this measures up –

  • Impossibly attractive people with unfeasibly perfect teeth – check
  • People in the past having truly phenomenal amounts of vigorous sex – check
  • People in the past thinking and talking exactly like we do – check
  • All past events accompanied by an incessant orchestral soundtrack. – Actually, The White Queen isn’t too bad on this count; instead, it’s most noticeable quirk is that it was filmed in Belgium, principally in nice but oddly unsuitable Belgian buildings that have rather too many obviously modern windows. (Downton Abbey anachronism pedants, eat your hearts out.)
  • Battles usually fought by about the same numbers of people who can be found brawling outside an average British pub on a Saturday night. – The White Queen seems to have got round this by not having any battles, or at least, not in the first episode, which is all I’ve seen so far. Now you can call me a reactionary old fuddy-duddy, but having a major series about the Wars of the Roses, one of the bloodiest civil wars in British history, without any fighting in it at all, does seem to be taking revisionism just a little too far.

But to return to my original point. Like everybody else, I’ve sometimes speculated idly on who might be cast to play my characters if the books ever got filmed. This is dangerous territory, because every reader will have their own image of each character in their mind’s eye, and, no doubt, each reader will have their own opinion about who should be cast in which part. (I’d love to hear your suggestions!) But I hope I won’t shatter too many people’s perceptions of the characters by putting forward a few of my own ideas. Matthew Quinton would have to be young and tall – although let’s face it, if the vertically challenged Tom Cruise can be cast as seven-foot-something Jack Reacher, anything’s possible. (Similarly, before Master and Commander was made, I doubt if Russell Crowe would have featured on many Patrick O’Brian afficionados’ wish lists of actors suitable to play Jack Aubrey.) Purely on grounds of nepotism, I’d be tempted to cast Jeremy Irvine of War Horse fame; I taught him, albeit only briefly, but then again, I also taught the guy who discovered Coldplay (it was that sort of a school). Whoever plays Francis Gale would have to convey a mixture of pathos, piety and ferocity, so maybe the likes of Hugh Jackman, while Phineas Musk would need to be of fairly indeterminate middle age, bald, and capable of random violence, so perhaps Timothy Spall or Ray Winstone.

And then, of course, we’d come to the 64,000 dollar question in every film set in the Restoration period – who could play Charles II? The king’s face is so firmly imprinted in many people’s consciousness that one can’t take too many liberties with physical appearance (sorry this time, then, Tom Cruise), but the part also requires an actor good enough to convey the many enigmatic sides to the king’s personality. In the last twenty years or so, there have been some triumphant castings – notably Sam Neill in Restoration and Rufus Sewell in the BBC’s The Power and the Passion – and the odd disaster (i.e. John Malkovich in The Libertine, which was a very odd disaster indeed). But the fact is that at the time when Gentleman Captain is set, Charles II was thirty-two years old, so ideally he should be played by an actor much younger than those normally cast in the part. Tall, distinctive features, thirtysomething…hmm, maybe Matt Smith will need something to do after he steps down as Dr Who?

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When this post goes ‘live’, we’ll be hacking up the A1 for a well-earned break in Northumberland (well, OK, Wendy will be having the well-earned break…). There’ll be some walking, some heritage sites, plenty of reading in the evenings*, and in my case, hopefully some serious thinking about both new and Quinton-related ideas. One thing there won’t be where we’re staying, though, is broadband, so tweets etc are likely to be few and far between, and there won’t be a new post here next week, when we’ll be hacking back down the A1!

(* In my case, Melvyn Bragg’s Credo, which is set in the area in the seventh century; it’s some 750 pages long, so I might be quite some time on this one!)

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Finally, in case anybody was wondering, the title of today’s post is the punchline of an old Welsh joke… ‘Notice on theatre door – “The part of the Welshman has been filled. The Dai is cast.’