J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

The Blast That Tears The Skies

But I Still Never Read Reviews, Dahling

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

Death’s Bright Angel by JD Davies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endless Poetry

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‘…this damned war: the mud, the noise, the endless poetry.’ 

(Lord Flashheart, Blackadder Goes Forth)

There are very, very few similarities between the First World War and the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-7). One of them, arguably, is that both wars generated a substantial amount of memorable poetry, albeit of very different kinds. Having known and loved the literature of the Restoration period from my youth – I studied Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel for A-level, not something that I suspect many British sixth formers encounter these days! – I was keen to reference it in the Quinton series, and The Blast That Tears The Skies, the first of the four books that will be set against the backdrop of the second war, provided an ideal opportunity to do so. Thus each chapter begins, not with my words, but with an epigraph consisting of a verse or two from some of the ‘war poetry’ of the age (or, in some cases, with verses from other poetry of the time, and even from popular songs).

The epigraph at the very beginning of the book is taken from Edmund Waller’s Instructions to a Painter:

First draw the sea, that portion which between

The greater world and this of ours is seen;

Here place the British, there the Holland fleet,

Vast floating armies, both prepar’d to meet!

Draw the world expecting who shall reign,

After this combat, o’er the conquer’d Main.

Waller’s biographer says of this work that it ‘turns the inconclusive battle of Lowestoft into a second Actium and the duke of York into a peerless hero of romance’; a few years later, the Earl of Rochester said of Waller that

He best can turne, enforce, and soften things,

To praise great Conqu’rours, or to flatter Kings.
Not surprisingly, Waller’s gushing hyperbole drew forth critics. 1666 brought forth Second and Third Advices to a Painter, followed in September 1667 by the Last Instructions to a Painter. The latter was certainly by the brilliant poet and satirist Andrew Marvell, the former two probably so, and I have attributed them to Marvell in the various epigraphs taken from the Second Advice. Marvell certainly pulled no punches. Here, for example, is his description of Sir William Coventry, secretary to the Lord High Admiral and a character in The Blast That Tears The Skies; Coventry was widely accused of corruption, notably the sale of naval offices.
Then, Painter, draw cerulean Coventry,

Keeper, or rather chanc’llor, of the sea;

Of whom the captain buys his leave to die,

And barters or for wounds or infamy…

Marvell had been to sea, albeit principally as a passenger, and his role as MP for Hull meant that he was well versed in maritime affairs. This is reflected in a passage which shows a clear grasp of the nature and horrors of naval warfare at the time:
They stab their ships with one another’s guns,

They fight so near it seems to be on ground,

And ev’n the bullets meeting bullets wound.

The Noise, the Smoke, the Sweat, the Fire, the Blood

Is not to be expressed nor understood.

The war also brought forth many lesser poets and song-writers. Most of these were unashamedly patriotic, and penned verses of varying degrees of awfulness. Here, for example, is an offering from the author of England’s Valour, and Holland’s Terrour (1665):
Our ships are bravely rigged, and manned with seamen stout,

Our soldiers good will spend their blood to bang their foes about:

They long to be a dealing blows, delay doth vex them sore,

With delight, they will fight, when the cannons loud do roar.

My personal favourite from this sub-genre is John Bradshaw, rector of the tiny village of Cublington, Buckinghamshire, many miles from the sea, who in 1665 was moved to write Some Thoughts Upon the Dutch Navies Demurr and upon the First Squadron of the Kings Royall Navy. This consisted principally of a succession of dreadful puns and couplets derived from the names of the ships in the Red Squadron of the Duke of York’s fleet. He excelled himself with his reference to the Royal Oak, named after the tree in the grounds of Boscobel House, Shropshire, where Charles II hid while fleeing from the Battle of Worcester in 1651:

I see not what your force can do to Penn

In th’ Royal Charles with all your ships and men.

Know that the sturdy famous Royal Oak

Fears not your artificial thunder stroke.

But if she should miscarry, we could fell

(If it were lawful) more at Boscobel.

Boscobel - the house and the 'offspring' of the original Royal Oak

The Second Anglo-Dutch War also saw some verse from men on the front line. But this certainly isn’t the savage war poetry produced by the men in the trenches. For example, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, later the sixth Earl of Dorset, was one of the great court wits of the age (not to mention having become a murderer at the age of nineteen, escaping only thanks to the king’s indulgent pardon). Like many young Cavaliers, he volunteered for service in the fleet in 1664-5, hoping to see some action against the Dutch in order to gain a military reputation. As it was, though, the only service of any sort that Buckhurst seems to have performed was to pen ‘To All You Ladies Now on Land’, which became wildly popular at Charles II’s court:

To all you ladies now at land,

We men at sea indite;

But first would have you understand,

How hard it is to write;

The Muses now, and Neptune too,

We must implore to write to you.

                        With a fa, la, la, la, la.

Elsewhere in The Blast That Tears The Skies, I’ve chosen chapter epigraphs that more generally reflect the mood of the time and the chapter itself. Here, for example, is a verse from a popular song of the early 1660s, which neatly encapsulates the age-old lament that things used to be so much better in the ‘good old days’:
New fashions in houses, new fashions at table,

Old servants discharged and the new not so able,

And all good custom is now but a fable,

And is not old England grown new?

While working one day on a manuscript volume from the 1660s in the Medieval glories of Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian, Oxford, I came across a neat little poem from the decade which perfectly encapsulates the cynicism of the age and thus provided the ideal epigraph for one of the land-based chapters of The Blast That Tears The Skies:

Good people draw near,

If a ballad you’ll hear,

Which will teach you the right way of thriving.

Ne’er trouble your heads

With your books or your beads

Now the world’s rul’d by cheating and swiving.

In something of a belated nod to my A-level English lessons, I also called on a couple of quotations from Absalom and Achitophel, notably his famous description of Charles II, with its brilliant double entendre about the king’s ‘extended wand’:

Auspicious prince! at whose nativity

Some royal planet rul’d the southern sky;

Thy longing countries’ darling and desire,

Their cloudy pillar, and their guardian fire,

Their second Moses, whose extended wand

Divides the seas and shows the promis’d land…

The literature of the age provides a wonderful resource for any student of the times. I’ll certainly be providing epigraphs from  the poems, songs and plays of the Restoration era in the fifth Quinton novel, The Battle of All The Ages, which I’m currently writing; set against the backdrop of the Four Days Battle of 1666, the year in question provides not only more acid satire from the Advices to a Painter but also John Dryden’s epic Annus Mirabilis. The poetic epigraphs are also likely to feature in the sixth book, and they’ll certainly appear in the seventh, which will centre on the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667 – a disaster that inspired Marvell to write probably his most devastating verse of all.

 

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!

A Broadside More

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Cheating this week, I’m afraid…a fairly major work crisis, so no time to write a proper blog! But it’s all for a good cause, and there’ll be some exciting news about the ‘Quinton Journals’ coming soon. In the meantime, here’s a little ditty published in 1665. In fact, this serves a double purpose rather neatly – as well as saving me time, it provides a superb insight into the sorts of mentality, language and anti-Dutch xenophobia that form the backdrop to both The Mountain of Gold and The Blast That Tears The Skies. ‘Hogen Mogen’ was an English nickname for the Dutch, derived from the translation of ‘High Mightinesses’, the form of address used for the States-General of the United Provinces. However, it seems that the author had very little idea of what he was writing about. The action he describes bears little resemblance to the Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, which forms the climax of The Blast That Tears The Skies, and his references to ‘Trump’ clearly refer to Admiral Maarten Tromp, who was killed in 1653 not long after (probably apocryphally) tying a broom to his mast to indicate he had swept the Channel, rather than to his son Cornelis, who was present at Lowestoft. The author is clearly also a rabid Cavalier who praises by name the two royal admirals, the Duke of York and Prince Rupert, but omits any similar mention of the former Parliamentarians, notably the Earl of Sandwich and Sir John Lawson. This tension between the two rival camps, deriving from the bitter legacies of the civil war, is a major plot theme in The Blast…