J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Great Fire of London

Game of Hats

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

ACADEMIC HISTORIAN

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

2/ Because of [1], keep job

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

***

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

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

 

Incoming Angel, Part 2

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The publication of Death’s Bright Angel, the new Quinton novel, is getting ever closer, so here’s another ‘teaser trailer’ for the book! This describes the destruction of the Dutch merchant shipping in the Vlie anchorage on 9 and 10 August 1666 (Old Style; 19 and 20 August on the calendar used by the Dutch, so the publication of this blog post falls neatly between the two sets of dates). This action, now all but forgotten in Britain, certainly isn’t forgotten in the Frisian Islands, where the 350th anniversary is being commemorated this month. My description of events in Death’s Bright Angel is based closely on the actual accounts of the attack: the Dutch losses were colossal, totalling some 150 merchant ships and cargoes worth over £1 million. For a moment, it seemed as though the ‘consequences’ that Matthew Quinton refers to early in this extract might become a reality – the collapse of the Amsterdam stock exchange, and perhaps a political revolution which might lead to the Dutch suing for peace. Not surprisingly, many contemporaries looked back and wondered whether the Great Fire of London, which took place three weeks later, was revenge for what the Dutch still call ‘the English Fury’.

What’s that you say? Does the plot of Death’s Bright Angel have anything to do with those rumours?

To coin a phrase: you may very well think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.

 

***

SPOILER ALERT – the following extract contains an important spoiler for those who haven’t yet read the fifth Quinton book, The Battle of All the Ages. Otherwise, read on!

 

‘Make for the furthest line of ships!’ I ordered.

‘Aye, aye, Sir Matthew!’

We were passing between row after row of hulls, sometimes four or five deep, some lashed together, most at individual moorings. But I knew two things. First, there was no point starting with the nearest ships; the wind was south-westerly, so we needed to start setting fires at the far end of the fleet, then work back, so that the breeze would do much of our work for us. Second, the ships furthest away for us were the ones most likely to try and make a run for the open sea; and so it proved. We emerged from between two rows of flyboats to see Holmes signalling from the Fanfan, while beyond, what looked to be a Guineaman, three privateers, and five more flyboats, were putting on sail and starting to move away toward the south-east, into a narrow channel between the Vlie island itself and some small inlets that lay between it and the mainland.

I looked across toward the Fanfan. Holmes was pacing the deck, jumping up onto the wale, shaking his fist and screaming inaudible obscenities at the fleeing Dutchmen. But he was a good enough seaman to know the reality of the situation. Finally, he went back to the stern of the yacht, waved across to the water to me, raised his hands as if to say ‘it matters not a jot’, and pointed back towards the hulls behind us. Nine had got away, but that still left over one hundred and fifty ships to burn. And in one sense, it was good that some of the Dutch had escaped. They would carry the news to Amsterdam of what the English had done at the Vlie, and God willing, that news would bring the consequences we all hoped for. So we left the fleeing Dutchmen to their own devices, put over the helms of our boats, and made for the ranks of ships in the Vlie anchorage.

***

‘Every ship to be fired!’ I ordered, as I climbed aboard a Baltic flyboat laden with grain from Poland.

In truth, my order was nearly as redundant as the fireballs. Every seaman knew how to fire a ship, and how to extinguish such a fire: countless vessels were lost to accidental blazes, so fire was one of the most feared of all the many hazards of the sea-business. Thus it was simply a case of men doing what they were always specifically ordered not to do, such as igniting straw below decks, laying a powder fuse to a tar barrel, and so forth.

As we pushed off from the flyboat and the oarsmen took up their strokes, I saw the first flames spit from the upper deck of the ship. It is remarkable how quickly a hull burns; soon, the whole vessel was ablaze from stem to stern. The breeze carried the flames into the rigging and upperworks of the ship secured alongside it, and in short order, that, too, was a roaring conflagration. So onward, through the entire fleet. It was slow work, but with no resistance at all, it was easy work, too. My men moved from hull to hull, methodically placing setting fires wherever they would cause the most damage. I looked across to the other groups of ships in my view. On all of them, Englishmen were engaged in the same work, firing their fuses and fireballs, getting back into their longboats, and rowing to the next batch of vessels. We cut the cables of many of the Dutch ships – in some cases, their own crews had already done so – so that burning hulls drifted against others, firing them in turn. Some ships burned more readily and fulsomely than others, depending on the nature of the cargoes they carried, but burn they all did, sooner or later. By the early evening, the entire Vlie anchorage was a carpet of flame, the smells of burning wood and scores of cargoes, from spices to pinewood to saltfish, putting me in mind of a vast kitchen. Guinea ships, Turkey Company ships from Smyrna and Scanderoon, Russia traders from Archangel, Balticmen from Danzig and Riga, flyboats laden with French wines from La Rochelle or Bordeaux, timber cargoes from Norway – all of them blazed away, sending a vast pall of smoke into the air. Even on the quarterdeck of the Black Prince, at anchor in Schelling Road some considerable distance from the seat of the fire, the heat warmed the faces of Kit Farrell and I as we watched the great merchant fleet perish. Against the setting sun, it looked like Hell itself.

‘A fine day’s work, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit.

‘Indeed, Captain Farrell. The Dutch hit in the only place where they truly feel pain – their pockets.’

‘And would you say that in the hearing of your wife?’

I laughed. Until only very recently, Kit would never have dared to make such a quip at my expense. But in many respects, we were equals now, and he, who knew Cornelia very well, was finally starting to come to terms with the fact.

‘Sakes no, Kit. Even if she were on the point of giving birth, she would beat me black and blue for insulting her countrymen so.’

Little did I realise how prescient both Kit’s question and my mocking response to it would prove to be.

At length, with the flames still raging all across the Wadden Sea, we went below for a supper of salt beef and execrable claret. Kit then went back on deck to take the middle watch, while I retired to my pallet in his cabin. It would be an early start on the next morning, when we were to execute the second part of the attack.

 

Want to know what happens in ‘the second part of the attack’, and how the plot of Death’s Bright Angel connects ‘Sir Robert Holmes, his bonfire’ to the Great Fire of London? Pre-order the book now – not long to wait!

A Darker Angel

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

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

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

 

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON:

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

A Historical Investigation

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Incoming Angel!

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Well, it’s August, which means the publication of Death’s Bright Angel, the latest Matthew Quinton adventure, is ever more imminent! To mark both this and the fast approaching 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, which forms the backdrop to the climactic chapters of the book, here’s the first ‘teaser trailer’ – yes, the first few pages of Death’s Bright Angel! More soon, but in the meantime, enjoy!

 

 

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE

 

The Great Fire of London began at about one in the morning on Sunday, 2 September 1666. By the time it was extinguished, some eighty hours later, about 13,700 houses had been destroyed, along with the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, fifty-two livery halls, eighty-seven churches, and St Paul’s Cathedral. About sixty to seventy thousand people were displaced, becoming refugees in their own city. Moorfields and the other open spaces in and around the City became vast camps for the homeless. Miraculously, fewer than a dozen were killed, although it is possible that the number of unrecorded deaths was higher.

For centuries, it has been accepted that the Fire was an accident, caused by the carelessness of a baker in Pudding Lane. Many contemporaries, though, were convinced that the Fire was started deliberately. 1666 had seen several plots, real or imagined, and countless intimations of imminent disaster. There were many predictions that London would be consumed by fire, as punishment for England’s sins (specifically, for those of her king, the notoriously immoral Charles II); indeed, even Mother Shipton and Nostradamus were supposed to have predicted the fiery destruction of the city in this, the year that contained the Number of the Beast in its date. Above all, though, at a time when the British Isles were engaged in a colossal naval war against both the Dutch and the French, many blamed enemy action – especially deliberate arson by foreign and/or native Roman Catholics. This opinion was reflected in a rabidly anti-Catholic inscription placed in 1681 on Sir Christopher Wren’s monument to the catastrophe; and although the inscription was removed in the nineteenth century, the monument itself still survives, giving its name to one of the busiest stations on the London Underground. Meanwhile, a French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, actually confessed to starting the fire, and was hanged as a result. But all modern books about the subject agree that he did not arrive in London until after the fire began, and the reason for his pointless martyrdom remains a mystery.

'The English Fury'
‘The English Fury’

The Great Fire of London is one of the most famous events in British history, one of the very few that still fulfils the age-old criterion of ‘what every schoolchild knows’, and its consequences still shape the cityscape of the United Kingdom’s capital to this day.

Rather less well known is the fire that destroyed the Dutch town of Westerschelling, known to contemporary Englishmen as Brandaris, just over three weeks before the Great Fire took place. Whereas the conflagration in London is generally regarded as the result of an accident, that on the Frisian island of Terschelling was a deliberate act of war, carried out by units of King Charles II’s Royal Navy. About one hundred and fifty Dutch merchant ships were torched in the adjacent Vlie anchorage, and the town was burned to the ground. The only known fatal casualties on the Dutch side were a watchman and two old women. The event is still remembered in the Netherlands as ‘the English Fury’, and the 350th anniversary of it is being commemorated on the Frisian Islands during 2016.

There is no known connection between ‘the English Fury’ and the Great Fire of London, although many at the time speculated that the one was revenge for the other.

 

 

 

PROLOGUE

 

Fire is a temptress.

To be sure, in childhood you learn very swiftly indeed that going too near her will burn you. Keep your flesh in her flames, and it will roast like that of a hog on a spit. When you are older, and witness such an event, you learn that if a living body is burned, as in a Spanish auto-da-fe, then the charred flesh will peel from the bones, and the sickly-sweet stench will attract the attention of dogs two miles downwind.

But there is that moment when you are close to the fire, but not too close. She warms you. She embraces you. She dances her seductive dance for you. She waves her red-gold locks at you, as brazen as a Dublin harlot. She lures you in. And you remember the scriptures’ talk of the refiner’s fire, the fire that cleanses, the fire that takes away your sins. In that moment, that one moment before your flesh blackens and the pain becomes unbearable, you want nothing more than to leap into the flames, to be consumed, to be at one with the temptress.

So it was with me, that September of 1666, when London burned and I felt the flames singe my face and hands as houses collapsed all around me. When I saw great Saint Paul’s, which had stood for half a millennium, crumble to ashes. When I thought, more than once, that this was justice: divine retribution for the flames that we, the English, had inflicted upon others. The flames of countless ships, burning upon the sea. The flames that I, Matthew Quinton, had inflicted upon peaceful innocents. The flames that, perhaps, provoked the most terrible of retributions. And vengeance, too, for the very personal sin that I had committed, the sin that could be purged from my body and soul by cleansing, redeeming fire. In those same fleeting moments, I wanted to turn, to fling myself into the fire, to feel the embrace of the temptress.

The base of the Monument
The base of the Monument

Sometimes, when I have business in the City – in other words, when I have to berate my brokers on the Exchange for swindling what they perceive to be an ancient, bent, senile creature out of a proper return on his investments – my coach takes me past Wren’s preposterous Monument to the Great Fire that consumed London, more than sixty years ago. (In England, we erect memorials to disasters. O tempore, o mores.) When I was younger, I would climb out from time to time, and read the inscription on the west side:

This pillar was set up in perpetual remembrance of the most dreadful burning of this Protestant city, begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction, in the beginning of September, in the year of our Lord MDCLXVI., in order to the effecting their horrid plot for the extirpating the Protestant religion and English liberties, and to introduce Popery and slavery.

Of course, those who consider themselves wise scoff at this. The Fire was not begun deliberately by the Papists, they say, but was a mere accident, all the fault of a baker in Pudding Lane. The inscription has become an embarrassment, and there is talk of altering it, or removing it altogether. But the mob, the many-headed monster that still sees the sinister arts of France and Popery behind, say, every accidental kitchen fire in Shoreditch, will not hear of it. And, of course, our so-called politicians become craven when confronted by the mob, and the wrath of the so-called ‘news-papers’ that pander to it.

What a country we have become!

So, whenever my coach takes me past the Monument, I think back to those strange days in the summer of 1666, the year that incorporated the Number of the Beast, and I think upon the truth of the Great Fire of London. The fire that I saw consume old Saint Paul’s, and dozens of churches, and street after street, and which threatened so much more, so much that was dear to me.

A great Popish conspiracy? The stupidity of a careless baker? Or something else altogether? Now there’s a question.

And perhaps it is time that I, one of the last who remembers the days of flame that consumed a great city, provided its answer.

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

‘Never thought I’d see the day when those colours flew proud in these seas,’ said Urquhart, the taciturn Scot who served as sailing master of my command, the King’s ship Royal Sceptre.

She was a fine sight indeed, the great sixty-gun man-of-war coming down at us upon the wind, exactly one month to the day before London began to burn. She heeled slightly to starboard, her sails filling with the breeze, the bow wave breaking around her cutwater as she surged through the swell. Her cannon were run out, ready for action. Her men were working the clewlines, leechlines and buntlines, gathering in the fore and main courses, a sure sign that she was intent upon a fight.

From the glorious ship’s ensign staff streamed a vast banner of pure white, interrupted only by fleurs-de-lis.

The royal ensign of France. Flying in the middle of the North Sea, at the very heart of what we captains of King Charles the Second regarded as our British seas. The France of King Louis the Fourteenth, who was allied to our mortal foe, the Dutch Republic, against whom we had just fought two colossal sea-battles, one of four days and one of two. So the great ship coming towards us was an enemy, and we were closing to engage it.

We: not just the crew and guns of the Royal Sceptre, irreverently by-named ‘the King’s prick’ by her crew, but our consort too, the nimble Fourth Rate frigate Association. We two ships had been detached from the main fleet to cruise southward, toward the Straits of Dover, expecting to arrest a few Dutch merchantmen disguised as neutrals, and maybe to fight a Zeeland privateer or two. Never, ever, expecting to be facing one of the leviathans of King Louis’ brand new navy. Five years before, France’s entire navy could have been defeated by a single Thames barge. Now this titan was coming straight for us, and we knew that somewhere behind her – hours? days? weeks? – was an entire fleet of her vast sisters, commanded by the Sun King’s bastard uncle, the Duke of Beaufort.

Our ship’s chaplain emerged from the steerage, strode up to the quarterdeck, looked over at the Frenchman, and nodded at me.

‘Now, Sir Matthew?’

‘Now, Francis, if you please.’

The Reverend Francis Gale, a stocky fellow fast gaining on his fiftieth birthday, with yet a slight trace of his native Shropshire in his voice, went up to the rail and looked out over the ship’s waist. Warrant and petty officer’s whistles brought forward a makeshift congregation of those who could be spared from their stations. My officers and I removed our hats in due reverence.

‘Thou, oh Lord, art just and powerful,’ Francis began, embarking once again on the great prayer before battle enjoined in the Book of Common Prayer. ‘O defend our cause against the face of the enemy. O God, thou art a strong tower of defence to all that flee unto thee; O save us from the violence of the enemy. O Lord of Hosts, fight for us, that we may glorify thee. O suffer us not to sink under the weight of our sins, or the violence of the enemy. O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for they name’s sake. Amen.’

The men in the waist echoed the amen.

When I first encountered him, four years before, Francis Gale was a hopeless drunk, broken by the memory of his true love’s death during Cromwell’s assault on Drogheda. Now he was the vicar of Ravensden, the family living in the gift of the tenth Earl of that name, my brother, and the deeply respected chaplain of my commands whenever he could obtain leave to accompany me to sea.

‘Oh Lord we beseech thee,’ he said, moving on to his extemporised prayers, ‘to grant us victory over the Frenchman, yonder. The true and natural enemy of all Englishmen, against whom our ancestors strived and triumphed at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The embodiment of the Popish tyranny that burned honest Protestant folk at the stake in the reign of Bloody Mary. That wooden hull, oh Lord our God, is the very embodiment of Popery and France! Popery, that consumes all before it by fire and treachery! Popery, that pretends to serve thee, yet is naught but the Whore of Babylon! France, that seeks universal monarchy over the world! France, that persecutes her own Protestant children, the godly Huguenots, more and more every day! Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, grant us the battle this day! God, grant victory to England, King Charles, the Royal Sceptre, and our noble captain, Sir Matthew Quinton! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.’

A growl, composed in equal measure of devotion and national fervour, came from the men in the waist. We officers made our own amens dutifully, if less fulsomely. As Francis turned toward me, I said, ‘A little strong today, Reverend Gale?’

He shrugged. ‘My mother never liked the French, Sir Matthew. Lost a lover in the Breton war in the old Queen’s day, or so she said. Besides, the men have got so used to fighting the Dutch, they might have forgotten they’re dealing with a different coin here. A very different coin.’

‘She’s changing course, Sir Matthew!’ cried Lieutenant Julian Delacourt. An eager but woefully inexperienced young man, only son and sole heir of an impoverished Irish nobleman, he had taken up his post in this ship just over a week before.

Indeed she was. With the wind south-westerly, the Frenchman was starting to turn north-east, giving us the advantage of the wind.

‘Running for the coast,’ I said to my officers. ‘Brave, to make for a lee shore. But he’ll have a shallower draught than we do, maybe even than the Association does, given how lightly the French build and arm their ships. A bold captain, this, my friends – running for the shoals, hoping he can outrun us as the flood sets to the northward, and thus get into the mouth of the Scheldt. But we’ll disabuse him of the notion, by God!’

Not many years before, Matthew Quinton would not have been able to make a speech like that. In those days, I could barely tell where north-east and south-west were. Yet then, I was already captain of one of the King’s man-of-war: a King’s man-of-war, and by far the greatest part of a crew, that did not survive to tell of my failings.

‘Gentlemen,’ said my not much older but infinitely wiser self, ‘we will clear for action, if you please. Mister Delacourt, we will signal to the Association –‘

Just then, and only for a moment, I caught a glimpse of part of the splendid white-and-gold carving upon the French ship’s sternpiece: a maid in armour, being wafted to heaven by angels. So this was our foe, as recorded in the latest list of King Louis’s men-of-war. The Jeanne d’Arc, new built at Toulon. In our tongue, the Joan of Ark. Well, we English had roasted the namesake, and now we would burn the ship named after her, too.

That said, I prayed that the Jeanne d’Arc was not commanded by either of the French naval captains whom I knew well. Roger, comte d’Andelys, was a good friend, who had served me in the disguise of a sailmaker’s mate when he was in disgrace at the court of King Louis. Whereas Gaspard, seigneur de Montnoir, a knight of Malta, was a mortal enemy, a fanatic who had once attempted to convert me to Rome when I was in his power.

I dismissed the thought. Roger was at his chateau in the valley of the Seine, trying to find a wife and fulminating against those rivals at court who had ensured he held no command at sea during this expedition. Montnoir, meanwhile, was supposed to have died aboard a great Danish man-of-war that I fought some six months before, the Danes, like the French, having joined the war on the side of our Dutch enemies; but although there had been no word of Montnoir since, there was no confirmation of his death, either. And while a part of me would gladly have fought the Seigneur de Montnoir once again, another part prayed fervently that such a truly malevolent and implacable enemy was already dead.

‘Fighting sails, Mister Urquhart!’ I shouted. ‘Master gunner, cartridge and shot to the guns! Half pikes between decks, if you please! Case shot to the swivel guns! Loose the tackles, open the ports, thrust out the main battery!’

Our drummers beat to quarters, our trumpeters sounded our ship’s challenge to its enemy, and the Royal Sceptre sailed into battle.

 

Want to read on? Then pre-order Death’s Bright Angel from any reputable outlet!!

Angel Delight

by

Cue drum roll…

Yes, here’s proof that the next Quinton novel, Death’s Bright Angel, really is on the way – the advance proof copy from Old Street Publishing! I’m currently working through this to eliminate any remaining typos, etc, but everything is on course for the book to come out as scheduled in August.

As you can tell from the cover, the centrepiece of the action is the Great Fire of London, the 350th anniversary of which occurs over the weekend of 2-4 September. (I’ll be in Oxford on those dates, and will be talking about the book on a panel at the Historical Novel Society conference.) Naturally, though, Death’s Bright Angel has a distinctly nautical take on the well-known story: not only does it begin with a duel between Matthew Quinton’s command, the Royal Sceptre, and a powerful French man-of-war, but a substantial part of the action takes place during the attack on Dutch shipping at the islands of Vlie and Terschelling, an event known to British history as ‘Sir Robert Holmes’ bonfire’ and to the Dutch as ‘the English fury’. Readers of the series will remember that Holmes is an old friend of Matthew’s, so it was very easy to get my hero into the real, and very dramatic, historical events!

The ‘bonfire’ occurred only three weeks before the Great Fire of London, and many contemporaries believed the one was revenge for the other. Death’s Bright Angel takes this idea, adds in elements from the many rumours and actual conspiracies that were swirling around during 1666, and places Matthew at the heart of a desperate race against time to prevent a devastating ‘terrorist’ attack. This, in turn, throws him into the worst crisis he has ever faced in his personal life… All of these plot strands intertwine and reach their climax during the Great Fire itself, as Matthew and his friends battle their way through the streets of a blazing city.

The thing that really makes Death’s Bright Angel different, though, is that it’s effectively ‘two books in one’. During the course of my research, I started to realise that a number of critical questions about how and why the Great Fire of London began had never really been asked, let alone answered, in all the previous published histories of this famous event, so I put my ‘historian’ hat back on and started doing some serious digging. Some aspects of what I discovered have gone into the main story of the novel, but many others are in a detailed ‘historical investigation’ – which is as long as many stand-alone e-books! This presents a large amount of previously unknown evidence about the Great Fire and the various conspiracy theories that surrounded it, both at the time and since. Above all, it presents an entirely new take on the long-accepted orthodoxy that the blaze was definitely an accident, caused by the carelessness of a baker in Pudding Lane.

So am I saying that the Great Fire of London was, or could have been, started deliberately? And if so, by whom??

You’ll have to buy Death’s Bright Angel to find out!