J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Gentleman Captain

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.

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.’

Merry Christmas, Restoration Navy Style

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Henry Teonge, a Warwickshire clergyman, was fifty-five when he first went to sea as a naval chaplain, presumably forced into the job by the extent of his debts. In 1675 he joined the Fourth Rate Assistance, commanded by William Houlding, which was despatched to the Mediterranean as part of Sir John Narbrough’s fleet, operating against the corsairs of Tripoli. Teonge kept a lively diary of his time aboard the ship, and during his subsequent service on the Bristol and Royal Oak. This is one of the best contemporary sources for the nature of shipboard life in the Restoration navy, and I’ve used it often during my research for the Quinton books. For example, several of the ‘menus’ for officers’ meals in Gentleman Captain were taken straight from Teonge, while my description of Matthew Quinton’s Christmas at sea aboard the Seraph in The Mountain of Gold was based closely on the following passage in the diary – his account of Christmas 1675 aboard the Assistance, near Crete.

24 Very rough today. No land yet. Our decks are washed for Christmas.

25 Christmas Day we keep thus. At 4 in the morning our trumpeters all do flat their trumpets and begin at our Captain’s cabin, and thence to all the officers and gentlemen’s cabins; playing a levite at each cabin door, and bidding good morrow, wishing a Merry Christmas. After they go to their station, viz. on the poop, and sound three levites in honour of the morning. At 10 we go to prayers and sermon ; text, Zacc. ix. 9. Our Captain had all his officers and gentlemen to dinner with him, where we had excellent good fare: a rib of beef, plum puddings, mince pies, &c. and plenty of good wines of several sorts ; drank healths to the King, to our wives and friends; and ended the day with much civil mirth.

Zacchariah Chapter 9, Verse 9 reads (in the King James version that Teonge would have used) ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.’ (The first part of the verse was later used for a famous soprano solo in Handel’s Messiah.) Teonge records no specific New Year festivities, although he did write a poem as a special New Year’s present for Captain Houlding. William Houlding, a former East India Company captain, held several important commands in Charles II’s reign, including that of the London in the 1673 campaign, and died on 20 September 1682.

A NEW-YEAR’S GIFT TO OUR CAPTAIN.

ACROSTICON.

W — hen Phoebus did this morning first appear,

I — nriching with his beams our hemispheare,

L- eaving the darksome night behind him, and

L — onging to be at his meridian;

I — magine then the old-year’s out of date,

A — new one unto Jove let’s dedicate—

M— an should not be like an old almanack.

H – eavens guide you, sir, that Paul’s words may be true,

O — ld things are done away, all things are new;

U — nto the rich endowments of your mind,

L — ift up your noble courage: Fortune’s kind

D — irections bid you forwards; your Assistance

I — s beggd by Mars for th’ Trypolenes resistance-

N — ‘er man more fit bold acts to undertake,

G — od with his blessings make you fortunate.

On 6 January, Teonge recorded the hilarious festivities for Twelfth Night.

6 Very rough weather all the last night, and all this day.  We are now past Zante; had we been there this day, we had seen a great solemnity ; for this day being Twelfth Day, the Greek Bishop of Zante doth (as they call it) baptise the sea, with a great deal of ceremony; sprinkling their galleys and fishing-tackle with holy-water. But we had much mirth on board, for we had a great cake made, in which was put a bean for the king, a pea for the queen, a clove for the knave, a forked stick for the cuckold, a rag for the slut. The cake was cut into several pieces in the great cabin, and all put into a napkin, out of which every one took his piece, as out of a lottery. Then each piece is broken to see what was in it, which caused much laughter to see our lieutenant prove the cuckold, and more to see us tumble one over the other in the cabin, by reason of the rough weather. 

And with that glorious mental image of the chaplain and officers of the Assistance laughing uproariously and falling over each other (and, presumably, the great cake), I’ll wish you all the compliments of the season and a very Happy New Year!

Thanks so much to all of you for your support of this blog and my books during 2012. Gentlemen and Tarpaulins will return on Monday 7 January, and 2013 will be quite a year! I’ll be using the blog to build up to the UK publication of ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and the North American publication of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, both in April, and then to the launch of Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales in July. There are also some other interesting irons in the fire, so please continue to watch this space!

Blasts from the Past

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I’ve been exploring the loft. To be exact, I’ve been exploring ‘my’ loft, i.e. the one above my workplace, ‘the Lair’. (As regular readers will know, this is a converted garage in the garden; probably the only garage in Britain with a bay window. Don’t ask, the previous owners had some very strange ideas…) The word ‘explored’ doesn’t really do justice to the nature of the operation; it’s impossible to stand upright in the loft, and as the first things that went in there after we moved in are at the far end, with more recent additions nearer the entrance, it’s very much akin to a Time Team dig, working on one’s hands and knees to remove the newer layers in order to reach the really ancient archaeology. The object of the exercise has been to get rid of the vast amounts that are surplus to requirements (farewell, 2004 bank statements) and to make space for more to go up there in the future (yes, books on medieval Scottish history used for deep background research for Blood of Kings, I’m talking about you). But I’ve been making some wonderful discoveries, becoming reacquainted with some old friends, and above all, rediscovering the evidence for the development of my writing career. For example, I’d forgotten quite how much satire I used to write at one time. I wrote quite a bit when I was at Oxford, probably reaching the pinnacle of my career as a comedy writer by penning a sketch for the 1979 Department of Educational Studies revue (Cambridge Footlights, eat your heart out). I continued to write satire during my first teaching job, in Cornwall, and still remember the po-faced reaction of senior management when one of my pieces (thankfully anonymous) fell into the wrong hands – believe me, Headmasters and their deputies don’t take kindly to having their self-importance pricked (and I say that as an ex-Deputy Head). Several of the items in question have turned up. For some reason, I decided that the school bore a certain resemblance to Colditz and thus cast the Head as the Commandant, with senior staff bellowing out orders in cod Allo Allo-style German accents; can’t think why.

However, the most exciting ‘finds’ have been the abandoned drafts of old attempts to write my first novel, and looking back through them, it’s now very easy to see why I gave up on them! They must all date from about the early 1980s to the mid-1990s: they’re all handwritten, and I abandoned that method in favour of word-processing around 1997-8. It’s impossible to date the drafts more precisely, but my hazy recollections suggest that in the early ’80s I was still convinced that I’d be the next Ian Fleming / Tom Clancy / Frederick Forsyth, writing techno-naval-global conspiracy thrillers; one in particular is  a labyrinthine plot involving Britain’s first Trident submarine, then just a sketch on a drawing board. (However, I’m quietly chuffed that I predicted one of the submarines in question would be named HMS Vengeance, probably about ten years before that name was actually allocated.) I’ve only dipped into it – the draft is quite long, maybe 20-30,000 words worth, and it now seems pretty excruciating – cardboard cutout characters including standard-issue CIA heavies, and so forth. At that time I was clearly still much more interested in the hardware than in such essentials as character development, and I was still convinced that one simply wrote ‘Chapter One’ at the top of a page and everything would flow naturally and inevitably from there; I hadn’t realised just how much time one needs to spend on plot construction, a longer and more difficult process than the actual writing itself!

At some point, though, the penny dropped and I decided to have a go at historical novels instead. Even so, there were a couple of odd detours along the way. For some reason now lost in the mists of the early 1990s, I started a couple of stories set in the 14th century.  Now, I wouldn’t say that what I know about the 14th century fits onto a postage stamp; probably more like the reasonably large books of postage stamps one gets at Christmas. Interestingly, though, one of them seems to be my first attempt to write in the first person, the method I later adopted for the Quinton series, so it clearly played a part in my development. I had a couple of stabs at Victorian-era novels and even bizarrely started a story set against the backdrop of the Welsh religious revival of the early 1900s (as if that ever stood a chance of having ‘bestseller’ stamped all over it…). Much more important, though, was my first attempt at a novel set in the Restoration navy – the real precursor of Gentleman Captain and the entire Quinton series. By now I was clearly putting a lot more thought into the preliminary development of the characters’ back stories, and the hero is – wait for it – a young gentleman captain of Charles II’s navy. What’s more, the villain is … [SPOILER ALERT FOR ANYONE WHO HASN’T READ GENTLEMAN CAPTAIN YET – DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE!] …a former Commonwealth officer who seems to be loyal to the Crown but is actually secretly plotting treason. But for some unaccountable reason I decided to ignore the entire milieu of the Restoration and the second Anglo-Dutch war which forms Matthew Quinton’s world, setting the story instead in 1679-80. Re-reading the story now, though, I’m quite impressed with some aspects of it; indeed, I’m not going to reveal anything more of the plot now because I think it’ll provide material for sections of future books, if not the basis of the story for something like ‘Quinton 14’!

I suppose what all of the above proves, apart from the obvious lessons about the importance of plot construction and characterisation, is the main message that aspiring novelists might learn from my experience – try, try, and try again! Oh, and tidy your loft every now and again; you never know what’s up there.

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I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post Monday; thanks to a tennis-nut friend, I’ll be on Centre Court for the first day of Wimbledon, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to write a post beforehand. Watch this space!

Aristocrats

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When this post goes ‘live’ I’ll actually be beavering away in the search room of Anglesey Archives in Llangefni, where I hope to obtain some useful material for Britannia’s Dragon. I’ll report back on my North Wales research trip next week, but in the meantime I thought I’d explore a theme that connects my current fiction and non-fiction projects.

One of the key themes underpinning the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’ is the hero’s complex relationship with his tangled family history, which often impinges on his progress as a ‘gentleman captain’ in the navy of King Charles II. This was one of the very first plot strands that I settled on when I started to develop the first book, Gentleman Captain, so as well as mapping out Matthew’s own character and immediate relationships, I also developed an intricate ‘back story’ which involved creating an entire Quinton dynasty dating back to the Norman Conquest and which is granted an earldom for service rendered to Henry V at Agincourt. Several aspects of this back story have already surfaced in the books – the death of Matthew’s father at the Battle of Naseby, and the impact this has on him; the importance of the role model provided by his grandfather the eighth earl, a larger-than-life swashbuckling Elizabethan seadog; and enigmatic references to court scandal involving his mother in the early years of Charles I’s reign. The new Quinton book, The Blast That Tears The Skies, develops several of these strands and adds some new ones that stretch even further back into the family’s history. Ben Yarde-Buller, my publisher, suggested that it might be helpful to readers to provide a family tree, so this is duly provided at the start of the book – commencing with the fourth Earl of Ravensden, a tough old warrior who fights in Henry VIII’s wars before marrying a former nun who lives to a very great age, outliving all her sons in the process.

Of course, in creating the ‘back story’ for the Quintons I had several real aristocratic families and actual individuals in mind. An obvious ‘dynasty’ with a similarly distinguished record of service over many generations would be the various branches of the Howards; others like the Dudleys rose, flourished and fell, while some like the Churchills produced outstanding figures a few generations apart. On Anglesey I’m not far from Plas Newydd, seat of the Pagets, Marquesses of Anglesey. The first Lord Paget was a prominent statesman of the middle Tudor period; his descendant the first Marquess of Anglesey led the cavalry charge at Waterloo, losing his leg in the process (the artificial replacement is preserved at Plas Newydd). Two of his brothers and two of his sons were prominent naval officers, all of whom will feature in Britannia’s Dragon, while several others, including the current marquess, served in the army, in Parliament, and so forth. I know this is a familiar story in many respects – wander around many a stately home in Britain and you’ll see endless portraits of younger sons in army or naval uniforms. But it’s actually quite an unusual story in Wales, partly because the Welsh aristocracy was so much smaller than its counterparts in the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom and partly because their history has been much more neglected. The Scottish nobility, owning grand castles and estates larger than many an independent country while being perceived as responsible for such injustices as the Highland Clearances, has been hugely prominent in the country’s history, has been studied in depth in many books and retains considerable influence; it’s hardly surprising that the first hereditary peer to be elected to the House of Commons should sit for a seat in the far north of Scotland that his family has represented for most of the period since 1780.  The Irish aristocracy of the ‘ascendancy’ has been studied and vilified in roughly equal measure; the shells of their great houses, burned down by the IRA in 1918-22, stand throughout Ireland as testimony to their dramatic downfall.

The Welsh aristocracy has no equivalent history of power, oppression or doomed romance. Apart from the occasional rant by Lloyd George or the odd Communist, the class as a whole has been virtually ignored. But then, for long periods of Welsh history there was no aristocracy at all; for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the counties of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, two of the most prosperous in the Principality, had no noble families domiciled in them, and for most of the rest of that period there was only one in each county. There was a gentry and squirearchy, but generally they were far poorer and less influential than their English equivalents. Their houses were more modest, too – the vast exceptions like Penrhyn and Cardiff Castles were often built by outsiders or those with ‘new money’.  But the stories of Welsh aristocratic families are worth telling, and in Britannia’s Dragon I’ll be focusing both on the seamen on the lower deck and on the likes of the Pagets and Sub-Lieutenant Micky Wynn, RNVR. Who he? In 1942 Wynn commanded one of the MTBs on the St Nazaire raid, supporting HMS Campbeltown (Lt-Cdr Stephen Beattie, another Welshman, who was awarded the VC) and performing heroics before losing an eye and being captured by the Germans, eventually ending up in Colditz. Wynn later inherited his family’s title and became the seventh Baron Newborough, owner of the Rhug estate in Denbighshire. Let Wikipedia’s bare entry record the bizarre sequel:

In 1976 he was called before the magistrates for allegedly firing a 9 lb (4.1 kg) cannon ball across the Menai Strait…the shot went through the sail of a passing yacht and he was charged with causing criminal damage. Even though it was his mother-in-law’s birthday, he denied the charge, protesting that it must have been someone else. He was found guilty and fined. He died in Istanbul in 1998 and his ashes were shot out of an 18th-century cannon.

I think both Matthew Quinton and his grandfather the old Elizabethan sea-dog would have thoroughly approved of Micky Wynn, Lord Newborough!