J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Naval historical fiction

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.

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!

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!

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!

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 2

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This week, a couple more ‘tarpaulin’ officers whose lives provided inspiration for the character of Kit Farrell in ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’. I’ll conclude the series next week with a look at probably the most famous tarpaulins of the age – the closely interconnected Norfolk admirals Christopher Myngs, John Narbrough and Cloudesley Shovell.

The Munden brothers – The careers of Sir Richard and Sir John Munden were particularly remarkable in two respects. First, they were particularly low-born, even for ‘tarpaulin’ officers; their father was the ferryman at Chelsea, although this was actually quite a lucrative employment, given the absence of bridges on that stretch of the Thames. Secondly, they rose to prominence at a time when opportunities for promotion for their kind were becoming ever more limited because of the increasing dominance of the ‘gentlemen captains’. That they were able to achieve what they did can only be a tribute to their own abilities.

Richard was born in about 1640, which would effectively make him an exact contemporary of both Kit Farrell and Matthew Quinton. He served in merchant ships prior to the second Anglo-Dutch war, entering the navy in 1666 as captain of the Swallow Ketch. He commanded a sloop in 1668 and then became master attendant at Deptford dockyard before commanding the Fourth Rate Princess in 1672. In the following year he took command of the Assistance, tasked with escorting outward bound East Indiamen as far as St Helena. Unknown to Munden, the Dutch had captured the island before he got there. He immediately launched an attack, and in addition to recapturing the island he snapped up three homeward-bound Dutch East Indiamen. His success led to a knighthood  and later to another plum command, the large Fourth Rate St David, employed on convoy work in the Mediterranean. Munden died shortly after the ship returned to England in 1680. He was buried in Bromley church, where his monument states ‘having been (what upon public duty, and what upon merchants’ accounts) successfully engaged in fourteen sea-fights … he died in the prime of his youth and strength, in the 40th year of his age’. The post-mortem inventory of his house in Bromley (where there is still a block of flats called ‘Munden House’) revealed an estate worth almost £6000, including shares in four merchant ships, chairs and carpets from Turkey, other materials from India, and a ‘Japan cabinet’. Munden left five daughters and a son, Richard, who later became a general in the army.

Richard’s prominence in the 1670s meant that he was able to promote the career of his younger brother John, who had been born in about 1645 but whose first thirty years of life are shrouded in obscurity. From 1677-80, though, John was his brother’s lieutenant in the St David, subsequently gaining several more lieutenancies before obtaining the command of a fireship in 1688. In 1689 he became flag captain to Lord Berkeley, Rear-Admiral of the Red squadron, and held the same post under Berkeley’s successor Sir Ralph Delaval aboard the Coronation, in which he fought at the disastrous Battle of Beachy Head (1690). From 1691 to 1693 he commanded the Lenox (the subject of Restoration Warship, a superb book by my good friend Richard Endsor, the cover artist of Gentleman Captain), fighting in her at the Battle of Barfleur in May 1692. He commanded various large ships in the latter stages of the Nine Years War and was promoted Rear-Admiral in 1701, when William III knighted him.

In January 1702 Munden took command of a squadron tasked with intercepting a powerful French force expected to sail from Rochelle to Corunna, then on to the West Indies. He cruised off Corunna but the French evaded him during the night and got safely into port. He considered the harbour too well defended and narrow to contemplate an attack. He was court-martialled for negligence on 13 July but acquitted, and returned to his command. However, public opinion had been highly critical of him for not pursuing the French into Corunna harbour, and the privy council was dissatisfied with his acquittal. Queen Anne and her ministers yielded to the public pressure and dismissed him. This is an excellent example of how public opinion had become an important factor in naval policy by about 1700; it had certainly not been so to the same degree in Charles II’s reign, and its increasing importance during the eighteenth century would ultimately lead to such dramas as the execution of Admiral Byng and the Keppel-Palliser court-martial in 1778. Meanwhile Sir John Munden retired to Chelsea, where he was described in his old age as ‘a very plain man in his conversation and dress, of a fair complexion’. He died on 13 March 1719.

History and Fiction

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I thought I’d take a brief break from my accounts of ‘the real gentlemen captains’ to give my impressions of last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, Novel Approaches: From Academic History to Historical Fiction, which continues this week in virtual form. First of all it was great fun, and it was good to meet and to listen to other people with similar enthusiasms to my own – although it was somewhat disconcerting to enter the hall and discover that roughly 80-90% of the delegates were female (one of them asked me at lunchtime if I was feeling outnumbered, which I definitely was!). It was particularly interesting to hear from others with a similar background to my own, i.e. people who started out as academic historians and then crossed over to write historical fiction, notably Alison Weir and Ian Mortimer. There was much discussion of the need to be ‘authentic’, but not entire agreement on what’s meant by ‘authenticity’; some authors clearly go to enormous lengths to ensure that there are no factual anachronisms in their work and that they comply entirely with the known historical record, while others (such as Mortimer, when writing fiction under his alias James Forrester) prefer to be ‘authentic’ in a broader way, to the sense and atmosphere of the period. I’m firmly in the latter camp, but this might be because authors like Mortimer and myself, who have been steeped in academic research on our periods for well over twenty years, possibly have a more instinctive feel for that atmosphere (and for the language of the time, etc) than someone researching a period from scratch, who might be more anxious to avoid making even minor factual errors, to alter the chronology, or to take liberties – up to a point – with the known life stories of real people. From an entertainment viewpoint, undoubtedly the highlight of the conference for me was the contribution by the literary agent Peter Straus, who emphasised the continuing primacy of word of mouth as the best means of promoting a book, the importance of luck (notably lacking in the case of the US edition of The Instance of the Fingerpost, published in the week that Diana died), the notion of the Booker Prize-winning formula (‘myth, love and history’, a la A S Byatt) and the lack of omniscience of publishers; hence the horrified initial reaction of the sales and marketing department to C J Sansum’s stunningly successful Shardlake series, namely ‘hunchbacks don’t sell’ (presumably forgetting what Shakespeare did with Richard III).

However, I think the main thing I took away from the conference was the increased acceptance from all parties that academic history and historical fiction aren’t two sides of a great divide, but are both staging posts in a spectrum – and both, indeed, are simplifications to a greater or lesser degree. Academic history used to like to see itself as a disinterested pursuit of truth; as Simon Schama put it, historians are ‘party poopers’, demolishing the widely accepted myths that the public is comfortable with. (Perhaps therefore historical novelists are ‘party animals’, perpetuating the myths – e.g. Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker with ‘mud, blood and donkeys’ in World War I – and dealing with those things that historians dare not touch because they lie beyond the boundaries of the sources, such as people’s emotions, such big issues as loyalties and beliefs, and the ‘what ifs’ of history). However, as several speakers stressed, academic history itself is increasingly seen as a fictive concept: historians select and interpret their material with greater or lesser degrees of subjectivity, while even ‘primary sources’ aren’t the beginning of a process but the end of one. They are the recording of an event that has already taken place, and are thus themselves subject to selection and subjectivity, rather like modern TV or newspaper reporting; or as Arthur Marwick used to put it, ‘history’ is actually the artificial construct, the prism, through which we study the totality which was ‘the past’, only a minute fraction of which we can ever recreate. I think this realisation that history and fiction aren’t really so far apart after all reflects the fact that academic history, once remarkably hierarchical and even snobbish, has become rather more tolerant and inclusive in the last 15-20 years or so. When I started work on my doctorate in the early 1980s there was a definite ‘pecking order’, with political and religious history at the top – the former, for my period, dominated by such titans as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and Hugh Trevor-Roper, all of whom I encountered at once time or another. (In Trevor-Roper’s case, this involved knocking him off his bike when rushing to his lecture; as far as I know, the trauma he might have suffered from my carelessness has never been advanced as a possible cause of his subsequent faux pas in authenticating the Hitler diaries.) Economic history was tolerated, social history was mainstream thanks to the likes of Hobsbawm and Thompson but was still not entirely respectable, while naval history was regarded very much as an unfashionable and insignificant backwater (although then probably still more ‘mainstream’ than gender and race history, etc).

Thus I was something of an exotic beast at Oxford historical seminars in the mid-1980s, although the tide was already turning. Indeed, the very fact that I was taken on as a DPhil student by Gerald Aylmer, one of the most eminent political historians of the day, has been used in a recent study of the progress of naval history as proof that things were changing. Now there is a chair in naval history at King’s College, London; a naval historian holds a fellowship of All Souls; Cambridge runs a maritime history workshop; and the numbers of those studying naval history at such institutions as King’s, Greenwich and Exeter probably run into hundreds. So maybe I’ll live to see a professorship in historical fiction at Oxford, but perhaps we’ll only be certain that all the barriers really have come down when David Starkey writes a sex-filled Tudor bodice ripper (ideally with a black protagonist) or Niall Ferguson succeeds Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver as the author of the next Bond novel, in which Q gives Bond six really ‘killer apps’. But I won’t hold my breath.