J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Matthew Quinton

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!

1665: The First Blast

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The new Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, is set against the dramatic events of the year 1665. This is one of the few dates in British history that most schoolchildren allegedly still know, but its prominence is due principally to the dreadful outbreak of plague that swept through London that summer – and from my own teaching experience over many years, I know that few things go down as well with twelve year old pupils as grizzly descriptions of plague symptoms and the often bizarre ‘preventatives’ that were adopted at the time. The plague does provide part of the backdrop to The Blast, but the book’s main focus is the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war, which was proclaimed in London on 4 March, and the main narrative runs from that time to the climactic Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, one of the great epics of the age of sail (and which I’ll describe more fully in a subsequent post).

The year 1665 began with a natural phenomenon that was taken by many at the time as a sign of great and terrible things to come. In November 1664 a comet appeared in the skies, remaining visible until March; a second comet was seen in April, although for the purposes of the novel, I’ve conflated these into one. Pepys first noted it on 15 December 1664: ‘so to the Coffee-House, where great talk of the Comett seen in several places and among our men at sea and by my Lord Sandwich, to whom I intend to write about it tonight’. Sandwich’s journal, published by the Navy Records Society in 1929, records that he had first seen the comet on the eleventh. On the seventeenth he recorded this description:

This morning about 3 o’clock I saw the Blazing Star again in the main topsail of the Argo Navis, distant from the Great Dog – 29o35′, the Scorpion’s Heart – 26o. The bodyof the star was dusky, not plain to see figures or dimensions, but seemed 4 or 5 times bigger than the Great Dog, of a more red colour than Mars. The tail of him streamed in the fashion of a birchen besom towards the Little Dog the one half of the distance between them.

Sandwich, commanding the fleet in the Channel, made regular observations of the comet throughout the winter. Pepys records frequent sightings of it and that the King and Queen sat up one night to watch it. The more credulous took it as an omen, and the first apparent proof of their dire predictions came on 7 March 1665, just three days after war had been declared, when the great ship London, a powerful Second Rate man-of-war mounting 76 guns, suddenly blew up in the Hope, a stretch of water in the Thames estuary. She was intended to be the flagship of Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red squadron, in the forthcoming naval campaign against the Dutch. Not all of her men were aboard, but a significant number of women were – wives, girlfriends and perhaps some rather less formal companions. Over three hundred were killed, although a small number survived because, miraculously, the roundhouse at the stern was untouched by the blast and remained above water.

Built at Chatham and launched in 1656, the London was an impressive ship which had served in the blockade of Dunkirk in 1658 and in the Baltic in 1659. At the Restoration, she was part of the fleet that went to Scheveningen to bring back the royal family; the new Lord High Admiral James, Duke of York, the future King James II & VII, was embarked in her. In 1665 she was armed entirely with brass guns, some of which had been made by a gunfounder coincidentally named Henry Quintyn. The cause of the explosion remains unclear, but both at the time and since, the principal concern was with the loss of so many valuable brass guns. Salvage attempts began almost immediately and some guns were brought up, but the great majority remained on the sea bed. The wreck of the London has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Several TV programmes have been made about it – I took part in the filming of one of them, a short item for BBC’s The One Show, last summer with Dan Snow – and these have inevitably made much of the fact that so many women were aboard the ship when she blew up, although this was not uncommon in the Restoration period. Additionally, the questionable legality of some recent salvages of guns from her has attracted the attention of the authorities. What is likely to become the definitive study of the reasons for the loss of the London and the fate of her guns has been written by my friend and colleague Frank Fox, author of the outstanding The Four Days Battle, 1666 (the setting for the forthcoming ‘Quinton 5’!), and will be published later this year in volume 8 of the Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society.

The destruction of the London forms the basis of a chapter in The Blast That Tears The Skies. No spoilers, though – I won’t reveal how Matthew Quinton becomes involved, nor the identity of the distinctly unlikely partner who accompanies him during this particular episode! And the London is only the first of the sky-tearing blasts that give the book its title…


The Princes, the Removal Men and the Big Hole in the Ground

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It’s been a busy week! On Saturday I chaired the Naval Dockyards Society AGM at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, before joining a party of society members on a walking tour of the site of the old Deptford royal dockyard. This is currently the location of a huge and ongoing archaeological dig preparatory to redevelopment of the site, although the development itself is proving controversial and is about to be redesigned yet again. The tour was certainly a real eye-opener. Although the vast foundations of the Tudor ‘great storehouse’ (left) have now been covered over, work has moved on to other parts of the site, exposing, for example, the dockyard smithy, No. 1 slipway and, most interesting of all from the viewpoint of a Stuart navy buff like myself, the walls of the wet dock, including a fragment of timber from the 16th century wall (below right). This struck a particular chord with me as the wet dock is the setting for an important scene in ‘Quinton 2’, The Mountain of Gold, which seems to be going down really well in the US following its publication there a few weeks ago. To think that this would have been part of the dockyard that Samuel Pepys knew, and where, in my fiction, Matthew Quinton fought the flames threatening the Seraph! It was also reassuring to find that my description of the dimensions of the dockyard, e.g. how long it would have taken people to move from one side of it to the other, which I derived from plans and pictures of the yard, was borne out pretty much completely by the actual experience of walking the site. More photos of Deptford dockyard will be posted on the NDS Facebook page in the next few days.

I was also in Greenwich a couple of days earlier to welcome back to England the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch at Chatham in 1667, which is returning to form part of the forthcoming Royal River exhibition at the NMM (I’ve been invited to the royal opening of this by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, so hopefully will be able to provide a ‘sneak preview’ in a future post). I’ve covered the sternpiece, and provided a picture of it, in an earlier post, so I won’t dwell on the importance of this iconic item here. But the return itself wasn’t quite what I’d expected. We were due to go aboard HNlMS Holland, the newest ship in the Dutch Navy, at moorings off Greenwich, but arrived to find said moorings disconcertingly empty. It transpired that thick fog had prevented her coming up the Thames on time, so the whole event had been moved to the Queen’s House. At this point I still expected the event in question to consist of a few dozen museum and embassy people milling around. Instead, the lawn behind Queen’s House was filled with hundreds of people, large numbers of military and naval folk in dress uniform, a naval guard of honour, along with TV and press galore. We had an announcement that ‘the princes are coming’, and a few minutes later, they duly appeared – Prince Michael of Kent and the Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne, both in flag officer uniforms. The band played, the dignitaries saluted and up rolled…a typical British furniture van, from which emerged typical British removal men, who proceeded to unload a very large box adorned with a picture of the sternpiece; and as is the way of British removal men, they did so with much grunting, scratching of heads and seemingly coming very close to dropping the whole thing off the back of the van. Nevertheless, the box duly emerged, the speeches were made (I’ll draw a veil over the number of basic historical howlers in one of them in particular) and the audience turned to the champagne, canapes and networking, which in my case involved talking about the volume of views of battles of the third Anglo-Dutch war that I’m editing for the Navy Records Society.

From a purely personal viewpoint, the return of the Royal Charles sternpiece is remarkably timely. She was the fleet flagship in the 1665 campaign and above all in the Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, which forms the climax of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies. Indeed, her duel with the Dutch flagship Eendracht leads to the dramatic event that gives the book its title. (Incidentally, several people have asked me about the origin of the title; it’s from the third verse of Rule, Britannia.) Several important scenes are set aboard the Royal Charles and quite a number of them are based on real events, such as a council of war that was attended by some of the most famous names of Restoration England and the Restoration Navy: King Charles II’s brother James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral and the future King James II & VII; Charles’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth; Prince Rupert of the Rhine; the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most famous Restoration rakes; Sir William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania; and of course, in my version by Matthew Quinton too. They would have been sitting literally a few feet from the wonderful relic of the Restoration navy that will be on display at Greenwich this summer and which I strongly urge all of you in the UK to go and see – clutching copies of Blast of course!

By Any Other Name…

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I’m back in full writing harness after a few days away in the Weald of Kent, visiting the likes of Hever Castle and Chartwell as well as making the obligatory jaunt over to Calais to pick up some cheese and one of those nice French apple tarts (and, yes, possibly the odd bottle of wine or two as well…). It was the first time I’d been to Chartwell, the home of Sir Winston Churchill from 1922 until his death, and although the house itself wasn’t open, a couple of exhibition areas were. One of them included a copy of a memo written by Churchill in 1945, shortly before he left office, in which he embarks upon a gloriously full-blooded Churchillian rant on the subject of foreign place names:

I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts…Constantinople should never be abandoned, though for stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it. As for Angora, long familiar with us through the Angora Cats, I will resist to the utmost of my power its degradation to Ankara.

With the surrender of Germany still some days away and the war against Japan still in full swing, the Prime Minister warmed to his theme.

You should note, by the way, the bad luck which always pursues peoples who change the name of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of their past…If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the BBC will be pronouncing Paris Paree. Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names.

One wonders what Churchill would have made of the recent transformation of Peking into Beijing, Bombay into Mumbai and Calcutta into Kolkata. My attitude to such things is a bit more relaxed than Winston’s (perhaps because when I was only nine my home town changed its name from Llanelly to the Welsh version, Llanelli), but even so, it took me quite some time to realise that Chennai was not some sort of vast Indian version of Milton Keynes that had suddenly sprung up from nowhere but was in fact the city I had always called Madras. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised just how much this question of ‘political (or historical) correctness’ in the selection of names impinges on my own work. For instance, in the fourth Quinton novel The Lion of Midnight, which I’m writing at the moment, a lot of the action is set in and around the city known to its inhabitants as Göteborg; but Quinton would undoubtedly have called it to Gothenburg, as most Britons still do to this day. (Of course, Churchill was quite prescient about this: the BBC and other media, which take such pains to get the spelling and pronunciation of the ‘new’ PC Asian and African names absolutely spot on, balk at applying the same approach to European names, presumably because they know that their audience would revolt if confronted with the likes of Göteborg and ‘Paree’.) On the other hand, Quinton would undoubtedly have called the Kings of both Sweden and Spain in 1666 ‘King Charles’, but I decided that this might cause confusion with the many references to his own king, Charles II, so the Swedish monarch has been rendered as Karl and the Spanish one as Carlos; but then, what to do about earlier Kings of Spain, as readers accustomed to think of the latter as ‘King Philip’ might be confused by ‘Felipe’?

Ultimately, my solution has been to apply a principle of selective inconsistency – to use the name that I think will be most easily recognisable to the majority of my readers, even if it doesn’t necessarily correspond to either absolutely accurate historical or modern practice. But I have much worse to come later in the year, namely my naval history of Wales, Britannia’s Dragon. Believe me, the minefield that is getting the terminology of the modern Third World correct is as nothing when compared with the dilemmas presented by Welsh placenames. Should it be Swansea or Abertawe (or, in the spirit of Derry/Londonderry, both?). Should the river be spelt Towy – probably still the form most familiar to non-Welsh readers – or Tywi, the correct modern (and ancient) version? Should I place Pontypridd in its current administrative region, the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf, or in the historical county of Glamorgan? I have a feeling that the somewhat idiosyncratic solutions I’ll be adopting might enrage a few purists with both Welsh linguistic and English historical sensibilities, and will almost certainly have Winston spinning in his grave, but I guess it’s a risk I’ll have to take!

The Art of Male Multi-Tasking

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It’s a very odd and hectic time at the moment. I’m simultaneously completing the final edits of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, ahead of its UK publication on 17 April, while also writing number 4, The Lion of Midnight, keeping a weather eye on the US publication of The Mountain of Gold on 17 February, and continuing the research for Britannia’s Dragon. (In fact, when this post goes ‘live’ I hope to be in the new Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum, getting on with work for the latter). Then there’s a book review, a conference paper, two talks, and the imminent arrival of the proofs of my essay in the latest Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society, all to be done within the next few weeks. Fortunately I’ve never found it particularly difficult to juggle a lot of things simultaneously and can work very quickly, but all of the above has caused me to make a few fairly random reflections on my working methods and on the nature of what authors do.

The first lesson- Don’t say ‘yes’ to so many commitments. Something that seemed like a good idea six months ago invariably comes back and bites one on assorted parts of the anatomy. And double-check the deadline: misreading ‘2 February’ as ’28 February’ several months ago has caused not a little angst here in the Lair over the last couple of weeks.

The second lesson – Don’t assume a project is completed until the hard copies of it turn up on one’s doorstep. I’d blithely assumed that all of the edits on Blast had been put to bed; the same thing happened on The Mountain of Gold. The consequence of this is…

The third lesson – Always factor in time for the unexpected that’s bound to crop up.  If it doesn’t, great, take a few days off and congratulate yourself on the brilliance of your time management. But if it does…

The fourth lesson – I suppose I’d always assumed that writing was an entirely solitary profession, where one delivered one’s inherently perfect manuscript to a grateful publisher with a heavenly choir singing in the background. Well, it’s true that it’s largely solitary up until the time when the first draft is completed. From then on, though, the author becomes simply part of a team, all of whom are working towards the same goal, the success of the book, and it’s essential to flick an internal switch and go into ‘team player mode’. The critical readers, the agent, the publisher’s editor, the other publisher’s editor…everybody will have their say, and it’s important to react to this input positively. Apparently Patrick O’Brian reacted badly to any criticism whatsoever, so his editor, Richard Ollard, had to handle him with kid gloves; and much as I love O’Brian’s work, one of the biggest influences on my own, it has to be said that some of the books in the series could have done with rather more rigorous editing. In my case, I still remember the horror I felt when the major edits of Gentleman Captain arrived with suggestions to delete whole swathes of treasured text and to add new passages. But that editor’s input was undoubtedly wholly well-founded, and her changes made the book vastly better than it might have been. Which leads into…

The fifth lesson – A book is therefore a product of compromise, but that doesn’t mean surrender (on the basis that ‘these people have been doing this sort of thing much longer than me, they must be right’). With The Mountain of Gold, one of my editors wanted the deletion of three scenes. I was prepared to go to the wall over one of them, and in the end we compromised: I got to keep the scene I was prepared to spill blood for, while the other two went (to be replaced by newly-written scenes that, again, tightened the narrative and thus made it a much better book). So honour was satisfied.

The sixth lesson –  Not even ‘the team’ has a monopoly of wisdom. At dinner last night, a friend who’d read Mountain of Gold said that it would have been really useful to include a map of the River Gambia, and that he’d only realised the ship was sailing east when he read my description of Matthew Quinton watching the sun sinking through the windows of his stern cabin. I suddenly thought: yes, now I come to think about it, I really wish I’d included a map. Other readers have balked at some of the nautical language that I take for granted, although I hope not to quite the same extent as O’Brian did, so there’s a running debate on whether or not to include glossaries in the Quinton books. I’ve resisted thus far, hearing my previous incarnation as a History teacher of 30+ years say countless times ‘If you don’t know what something means, go away and look it up!’. But I can see the counter argument, too, and would welcome readers’ thoughts on whether such an addition would be useful.

Anyway, that’s enough reflection for now. After all, writing a weekly blog is another commitment to add to those I listed at the beginning, and I really must get back to the ‘day job’ proper!

Vanished Empires

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‘The Journals of Matthew Quinton’ are set principally during what are known as ‘the Anglo-Dutch wars’, but like most generalisations used to describe historical periods, that label actually conceals a much more complex picture. For one thing, the wars were not exclusively Anglo-Dutch: the second, from 1665 to 1667, also involved France, Denmark-Norway and even the Prince-Bishop of Munster, while the third, from 1672-4, was part of a much larger conflict that the Dutch regard as effectively their second war of independence, fought overwhelmingly against the French.

The same is true of the colonial conflicts that form the backdrop of The Mountain of Gold, the second book in the series. Anglocentric sources have sometimes seen the colonial conflicts of the early 1660s as being primarily between the English and the Dutch, especially in West Africa, but in reality many European powers, including some pretty unlikely ones, were scrabbling desperately to get their hands on slices of colonial action. Much of the action of The Mountain of Gold is set on the River Gambia, but there are allusions to the larger expedition undertaken by Major (later Sir) Robert Holmes in 1663-4 against the Dutch forts on Cape Coast and the Gold Coast. But several of these had only very recently become Dutch; until 1663 several of them had been Swedish and bore Swedish names like Carolusborg. There were a number of Danish outposts, too, and the French had already established Fort St Louis, later Dakar, which features in The Mountain of Gold. Perhaps most bizarrely, the Duchy of Courland – which occupies part of the land area of modern Latvia – held St Andrew’s Island in the Gambia River, although this was sold to the Dutch shortly before the Holmes expedition arrived and conquered it, turning it into James Fort (which later became an important centre of the slave trade). Having made a few slight tweaks to the chronology, I’ve used the Courland element in the book; indeed, the climactic battle takes place on St Andrew’s Island. But this was not the sole extent of Courland’s imperial ambitions: Duke Jakob, a godson of King James VI & I, also acquired the island of Tobago, although this was abandoned to the Dutch in 1666.

Of course the larger nations had also established themselves in north America, not always successfully. New Sweden, established in 1638, was a quite extensive colony along the River Delaware, including parts of the modern states of Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But during the Northern War of the 1650s, the Dutch moved against this colony and overran it in 1655. Their triumph was brief: in 1664 ‘New Netherland’ was conquered in turn by the British, and part of the former Swedish colony was sold to Sir George Carteret, a colleague of Pepys on the Navy Board (and who appears as a minor character in The Mountain of Gold), who named his territory after the Channel Island which he called home, thus establishing New Jersey. Meanwhile Colonel Richard Nicholls had led an expedition to annex the small Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, which was duly renamed New York after Nicholls’ patron, the Lord High Admiral and brother of King Charles II. The Nicholls expedition is recreated in Broadside, an excellent but regrettably little seen documentary in which I participated.

By coincidence, the two effective ‘creators’ of New Jersey and New York both lie buried about five miles apart, just a short distance from where I live in Bedfordshire. Carteret lies in a fairly bland family vault at Haynes church (right), but Nicholls’ memorial (below), in St Andrew’s Church, Ampthill, is spectacular. A florid Latin inscription describing how he removed the Dutch from New York (‘belgis expulsit’) is surmounted by the Union flag and the stars and stripes flanking the actual cannonball that killed him while he was attending upon the Duke of York during the first naval battle of the misnamed third Anglo-Dutch war, the battle of Solebay on 28 May 1672. My geographical proximity to these two memorials to the colonial conflicts of the 1660s was one of the factors that inspired the plot of The Mountain of Gold.