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Tudors

Tidal Wave

21/01/2019 by J D Davies

At long last, I’m thrilled to be able to confirm that the first book in my new Tudor naval fiction trilogy will be published by Canelo this summer, currently as an e-book only.

And the title is…

Cue drumroll!

Cue trumpets!!

Cue my hometown male voice choir singing the Welsh national anthem!!!

DESTINY’S TIDE

Followers of this blog will know that this book has had a long and pretty unusual gestation period. Whereas authors invariably have to edit their work down to an acceptable length (unless you’re George R R Martin, obviously), I found myself having to more than double the length of a story that had originally been conceived as a novella. This proved to be quite fraught, and took rather longer than anticipated (with a knock-on effect on other projects), but it’s finally ready to go. And here, for the first time in any medium, is a preview of the book…

England, 1544

It is a dangerous time.

The religious changes enforced by the capricious old king, Henry VIII, have created fear, uncertainty and suspicion, while the king’s pride has led the country into simultaneous wars against France and Scotland. Against this backdrop, Jack Stannard, a young shipmaster, grieves for his dead wife, while hoping that the wars will provide an opportunity to distinguish himself, to provide for his motherless children Meg and Tom, and to restore the fortunes of his hometown of Dunwich. For centuries, though, the sea has eaten away at ‘England’s Atlantis’, while its rising neighbour, Southwold, plots incessantly to supplant it. Jack also has to battle the demons personified by his own father, a man with a dark and violent history, albeit now brought low by a terrible illness.

The beach and cliff at Dunwich, Suffolk. The coast was once more than a mile further out to sea; the remains of the town and its seven churches still lie underwater

As he sails to fight the Scots, Jack is accompanied by his mentor, Thomas Ryman, erstwhile soldier and equally erstwhile friar. Together, they fight ferocious battles in Scottish waters, while also contending with insidious enemies within their own ranks. Meanwhile in London, Jack’s old schoolfriend, Will Halliday, and his master, William Gonson, the effective organiser of the king’s navy, struggle to fit out a fleet for an even greater war against France, even as Gonson is consumed by memories of the terrible, unjust fate that befell his son. Jack and Will once harboured ambitions of singing before the king as members of his elite Chapel Royal, but destiny has now set them upon very different courses, with their futures, loves, and very lives, depending on the success of King Henry’s wars.  

The surviving remains of the Greyfriars at Dunwich – Thomas Ryman’s home until the abrupt and shocking Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII

Fresh from the campaign in Scotland, Jack Stannard sails for France and the great siege of Boulogne. There, he encounters an exotic foreigner whose words have a profound influence on him, challenging his entire view of the world and of his own future. Meanwhile, in Dunwich, Jack’s precocious nine-year-old daughter Meg has dreams and ambitions of her own, dreams and ambitions that have no place for the potential new wife who seems to be being foisted on her father. But Meg’s aspirations, and indeed her very life, are soon threatened by the sea’s relentless assault upon the ancient port.

The story culminates in the dramatic events of 1545, when the French launch a colossal invasion fleet against England. Sailing into battle against it, Jack and Ryman are hamstrung by treachery from closer to home than they could ever have expected. Events move inexorably to a shattering climax aboard the pride of Henry VIII’s navy – the great ship Mary Rose…

The hull of the Mary Rose, raised from the seabed in 1982, now preserved in a superb museum in Portsmouth

***

Destiny’s Tide is based closely on the historical record, and upon the true stories of both ‘the lost city’ of Dunwich and the Gonson family. Although the Stannard family is fictitious, the England in which the three generations of it at the centre of the trilogy live and strive is recreated as faithfully as possible – a land torn apart by bitter religious divisions, even as the kingdom takes a dramatic new direction, a ‘turn to the sea’ in which gallant, ambitious merchants, mariners and warriors start to cast their eyes and set their sails far beyond the realm’s traditional boundaries and ambitions. Together, over a period of forty years, the Stannards and the Gonsons will be at the very heart of the astonishing rise of England’s Navy Royal.

The second book, set nearly a quarter of a century after the events of Destiny’s Tide , will take the Stannards to the Caribbean in company with John Hawkins and his young protege, a certain Francis Drake, while the final instalment, another twenty years further on, will centre on the titanic fight for England’s very survival as the ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada approaches its shores…

***

I’ve already started work on the second book, which Canelo hope to publish as soon as possible after the first. But I certainly hope to get back to writing further titles in the Quinton series as soon as possible!

In the meantime, I’m trying to work out how I managed to commit myself to giving five talks in the first fortnight of February (I suspect the words ‘yes, I’ll do it’ might be part of the answer). Most of these are to selected audiences, but on 7 February, I’ll be talking at an open event in the wonderfully historic St Nicholas church in Deptford (full details here). This is under the auspices of the Lenox Project, which aims to build a replica of a particularly important Restoration warship, and I’ll be speaking alongside my old friend Richard Endsor, author of the definitive book about the ship. It should be a fun night, with music (not provided by us, have no fear) and refreshments, so if you’re in the general vicinity, please come along – it’s free!

Filed Under: Maritime history, Naval historical fiction, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Destiny's Tide, Dunwich, Henry VIII, Tudors

How Not to Write a Tudor Novel

08/08/2017 by J D Davies

A few months ago, I announced my exciting new project – three linked naval fiction stories, set in the Tudor period, which will eventually combine together to be published as one ‘traditional’ book by the splendid new imprint, Endeavour Ink. Since then, in addition to finishing off other projects, I’ve slowly been getting my research materials together, sorting out my ‘fieldwork’ expeditions, beefing up the back stories of the principal characters, fine tuning the plot, and, yes, typing ‘Chapter One’ – or, as it’s otherwise known, ‘the point of no return’. Very soon, it’ll be time to start writing in earnest.

No.

Before I get started properly, though, I suppose I ought to confess my misgivings about tackling something Tudor. Yes, I know the period – studied it at university, taught it to A-level for years, read countless fiction and non-fiction books about it, watched Keith and Glenda in their pomp, etc etc. So to say it holds no terrors is an understatement. But, of course, the Tudors are very much the comfort blanket of historical fiction: it’s the go-to period for many authors and readers alike, and it’s the obvious staple for any lazy TV producer thinking of making a historical drama, a documentary, or, indeed, a drama-documentary. So I’m very aware of the danger of falling into some of the weary old cliches, and the diametrically opposite danger of writing something that goes a bit too far in outraging those who actually love the weary old cliches. Just so we’re all on the same wavelength from the start, therefore, I thought I’d flag up some of the things I’m not going to do in these stories.

  1. There won’t be any wives. (Well, yes, obviously, there’ll be men in the story with wives, and some of those wives will be major actors in the narrative. But they won’t be Those Wives.)
  2. Especially not the second one.
  3. Nor her sister.
  4. No mental picture or word portrait of any of the characters I’m developing could possibly be interpreted in casting directions as ‘teen model’.
  5. People won’t talk like they’ve just strayed from the set of Eastenders.
  6. Or The West Wing.
  7. Or, umm, The Tudors.
  8. Still no.

    There won’t be dialogue like ‘Where the hell is the Spanish Armada? It should have been here yesterday’. (Real recent TV script, anonymised to protect the guilty.)

  9. There will be scenes in Scotland, but they won’t feature That Queen.
  10. Therefore, there’ll be no scene where That Queen has a totally invented meeting with That Other Queen (you know the one, redhead, virgin, bit feisty, blah blah).
  11. Religion won’t be an inconvenient add-on, paid lip service with the odd reference to God and a stray priest or a dodgy nun hovering in the background. It was centre stage for people at the time, and it’ll be centre stage for people in my narrative. (For more of my thoughts on this subject, particularly in relation to my current series of Quinton Journals, have a look here.)
  12. Whether you love it or you hate it, there’s only one Wolf Hall (leaving aside the two sequels, obviously – and could you just hurry up a bit with the second one, Hil? Thanks.) This will be a Cromwell-free zone, although now I come to think of it, there is one character that Mark Rylance would be brilliant for. And it won’t be written like that, either.
  13. Similarly, it’s not going to be Shardlake, so people won’t die in incredibly unlikely circumstances as a result of intricate conspiracies centred around one or more of Those Wives.
  14. …and it’s not going to be a Tudor version of Patrick O’Brian; for one thing, in the Tudor world, any character resembling Stephen Maturin would probably have been burned at the stake before breakfast.
  15. Above all, the cover won’t feature a headless woman in a nice dress. (Unless you’re not telling me something, Endeavour Ink.)

So, then, time to write the first scene in which King Henry VIII makes an appearance.

(Casting recommendation: Danny Dyer.)

Filed Under: Naval historical fiction, Uncategorized Tagged With: Tudors

At Last It Can Be Told!

27/02/2017 by J D Davies

Cue fanfare from massed ranks of trumpeters, plus assorted Welsh male voice choirs…

I can finally reveal the really exciting news that I’ve had to keep under wraps for several months. My e-book publisher, the fantastic Endeavour Press, is launching a new traditional publishing imprint, Endeavour Ink…and I’m one of the authors on their launch list! You can find out more about this terrific new venture, and see what illustrious company I’m in, here and here.

First and foremost, huge thanks to Richard Foreman and the team at Endeavour for showing such faith in me – I certainly hope to be able to repay it. Along with my agent, Peter Buckman, we had quite a bit of discussion before Christmas last year about the nature and time period of the new set of stories I’d develop for Endeavour Ink, but in the end, we settled on something that we’re all very happy with. Personally, I can’t wait to get started on writing the first of the three linked stories that Endeavour Ink have commissioned from me (and have, indeed, already done a fair bit of research and planning for it). So without further ado…

The new stories will have a very new setting for me, namely the Tudor age. Having said that, this is, in many respects, very familiar turf indeed: in my ‘previous life’, I taught the Tudors to A-level students, and to much younger schoolpupils, for many years, so I think I’ve got a pretty strong grounding in the period. In terms of naval history, of course, it doesn’t get much more seminal, and the timeframe I’ve chosen for the three stories reflects that. The first story takes place in the mid-1540s, so it’s hardly a major spoiler to reveal that it might just include the sinking of a certain ship*…and similarly, the third story takes place in 1588, so no prizes for guessing which major historical event provides its primary focus.

No, not that one
* No, not that one

But the famous events serve a second purpose. They provide the backdrop to the story of one family, drawn from one particularly remarkable, haunting, and very real place, whose members serve at sea throughout the period. They live through the trauma of profound religious change, experience times of great political turbulence, are riven by the horrors of war, and fight an enemy more terrible and relentless than anything the French or Spanish can throw at them. They encounter some of the great historical figures of the period, from Henry VIII to Francis Drake. Above all, they play their parts in the rise of the English ‘navy royal’ under Henry and his daughter, ‘Gloriana’, Queen Elizabeth I. So it’ll be a big change from the Quinton Journals, both in terms of period and theme.

If all goes well, I’ll be writing the first of the new Tudor stories in the second half of the year. In the meantime, I’m finishing off the new Quinton title, The Devil upon the Wave, and will then be working on the new academic book on naval ideology, 1500-1815, that I’m co-editing with Alan James and Gijs Rommelse. So 2017 is shaping up to be a pretty busy, but hopefully very rewarding, year!

Filed Under: Fiction, Naval historical fiction, Uncategorized Tagged With: Endeavour Ink, Tudors

The Kings of Post-Truth

09/01/2017 by J D Davies

OK, right, all this ‘post-truth’ malarkey, then.

Now, you know you’re never going to get out-and-out politics in this blog, for reasons I might fully elucidate one day. But for various reasons, I’ve been getting a little peeved with all this media hype about ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’, and so on and so forth. To me, much of it seems to be, to a certain degree, yet another case of historically illiterate journalists (and even more historically illiterate users of social meejah) suddenly waking up to a phenomenon that they assume to be new, but which has actually been around forever and a day. The always fascinating Many Headed Monster blog recently demonstrated how fake news was endemic during the British civil wars, for example, while the dear old Daily Mail has been shamelessly peddling colossal whoppers (and influencing the outcomes of elections with them) since at least the Zinoviev Letter in 1924. Back in my previous life, I used to show my GCSE students the famous ‘before and after’ pictures of Trotsky alongside, and thus clearly both physically and politically close to, Lenin – a fact so inconvenient to Stalin that he got his proto-photoshoppers to simply remove Trotsky from the picture, long before an icepick removed him from the bigger picture too. So the principle has been around since the serpent spun a bit of fake news to Eve; the only thing that’s ‘new’ is the method of delivery (after all, as vehicles for news delivery and political debate, Facebook and Twitter are little more than shiny versions of 1640s newsbook-fuelled pub arguments), its potential reach, and arguably, the greater gullibility of its audience. All of this was grist to the mill of a man who would undoubtedly nod sagely and mutter plus ça change about all this ‘post-truth/fake news’ debate, namely the genius who literally wrote the book on the subject, Mr George Orwell.

Now you see him, now you don't
Now you see him, now you don’t

But there needs to be one big caveat to all this: what we assume to be absolutely cast-iron ‘facts’ often turn out to be anything but. To demonstrate my point, I want to look at one seemingly unassailable set of ‘facts’, namely the names and dates of the Kings and Queens of England.* How on earth can these be ‘dodgy’ in any shape or form, you might reasonably demand?

The catalogue of English monarchs is probably the best known chronological sequence of heads of state in the world – so much so, indeed, that there are sad people out there who have, as one of their claims to alleged fame, the ability to reel off the names and dates of all the monarchs since 1066. (Raises hand tentatively, then swiftly puts it back down again.) But once you start to unpick it, these supposedly certain ‘facts’ look rather more shaky than they might first appear to be. Take, for example, the civil war during the 1130s to 1150s, known to history as ‘The Anarchy’ (and just how subjectively loaded a description of an epoch is that?). Just who, exactly, decided that only King Stephen would be regarded as the true monarch for the entire period between 1135 and 1154, despite the arguably superior claim to the throne of the Empress Matilda – who, indeed, effectively controlled most of the country for some of that time? How is it that Matilda’s place in the list, and thus her claim to be England’s first female monarch, has always been denied, while the ‘readeption’ of Henry VI in 1470-1 – which is probably just as debatable as her ‘reign’ – has usually been included? Might we be dealing with a teeny weeny bit of Victorian misogyny here, heavily influenced by a large dash of Shakespeare?

(Similarly, Lady Jane Grey was once left out of the list entirely, but now seems to be a permanent fixture. But just about the one thing that distinguishes her from other so-called ‘pretenders’ who were proclaimed monarch in opposition to the supposedly rightful heir – say, Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck, or the Duke of Monmouth – is that, unlike the others, she and her supporters controlled London, if only for nine days. So is the inclusion of Jane in regnal lists merely yet another blatant example of metrocentric bias?)

If you haven't read it, leave this website immediately and never darken my door again
If you haven’t read it, leave this website immediately and never darken my door again

The regnal list fascists have also struggled with the notion that it might be possible to have two monarchs simultaneously. True, they make grudging allowance for William and Mary, although I seem to recall that in my childhood, the latter was often airbrushed out of the record as comprehensively as Trotsky, despite the hugely important work she did in her own right (as I discovered when I touched on aspects of her role in directing naval affairs after 1689). Sellars and Yeatman memorably satirised the intellectual hurdles inherent in the concept of joint monarchs by combining the two into a single androgynous creature called Williamanmary, alongside a picture of a crowned fruit (‘England ruled by an Orange’). But if William and Mary are allowed, why not Philip and Mary a century and a half earlier? Philip of Spain was given full monarchical status by his wife – coins, acts of Parliament, etc, were all made in the names of Philip and Mary jointly. So surely writing Philip out of the record is nothing more or less than a manifestation of Protestant xenophobic bias against the man who would later despatch the Spanish Armada against these shores? Similarly, Henry II had his eldest son, another Henry, crowned in his lifetime, to prevent future succession disputes, but ‘the Young King’, as he was known, never features in the lists, perhaps because ‘Henry II(A)’ is just too difficult for some to get their heads around.

Let’s take another example. When he was restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II and his ministers categorically proclaimed it to be the twelfth year of his reign, thus effectively declaring that the Interregnum had never legally happened at all, and that thus, more importantly, all of the legislation passed during that time was invalid. But at some subsequent point, somebody, identity unknown, sensibly decided to ignore the Royalist interpretation of what had happened between 1649 and 1660 – thus making a political judgement on which set of ‘facts’ should be accepted, and which should not. One need not add, of course, that for Jacobites – and there are still a few out there – every ‘regnal date’ since 1688 has been a fiction, and we are currently living in the eleventh year of the reign of His Majesty King Francis II, who fills in the time before his inevitable and glorious restoration by fulfilling the onerous duties of the patron of the Bavarian Dachsund Club.

'Don't call me Mrs Tudor'
‘Don’t call me Mrs Tudor’

The familiar sequence of names of the royal houses is equally contentious. The late, great Tudor historian Cliff Davies caused a minor furore in academic circles a few years back – not to mention much wailing and gnashing of teeth among historical novelists and the makers of countless BBC dramas and documentaries – by pointing out that England’s most famous dynasty never actually called themselves by the surname at all, partly because of a degree of shame about the name’s humble Welsh origins, partly because they actually saw themselves as reuniting the disparate strands of the old Plantaganet royal line. (The abstract is here, although the full article is behind an armed Mafiosi checkpoint – sorry, academic publisher paywall.) Indeed, he argued, hardly anybody else in the ‘Tudor age’ ever used the word ‘Tudor’, either. Even in our times, there’s been a nagging uncertainty about what the surname of the current royal family actually is: the brilliant Netflix series The Crown convincingly portrayed Prince Philip’s fury at not being able to bestow his own name on his children, although that name (Mountbatten) is itself an invention, only four years older than the prince himself, as is his wife’s maiden name of Windsor. Still, Mountbatten-Windsor is probably preferable to trying to conjure a suitable moniker out of the coupling of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg with Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.  

One final point. Who, exactly, decided that the list of ‘English’ monarchs should only commence in 1066, when the English royal line was comprehensively overthrown by a Norman invader? What about all the Saxon and Danish Kings of England before that date? True, it suited all the Norman Edwards to number themselves as though the likes of Edward the Elder never existed – but why on earth have all subsequent historians, makers of lists, and setters of pub quizzes, bought into that hugely political reinvention of history by a bunch of Anglo-French toffs?

There we have the nub of the problem: the list of Kings and Queens of England is not the string of unassailable set-in-stone facts that it appears to be, but an arbitrary set of choices based on political prejudices and unchallenged orthodoxies. And if that is the case, and the facts themselves are potentially so badly flawed, then ‘post-truth’ thinking in such cases can actually be a positive, forcing us to reassess the very building blocks of history from first principles.

To conclude, then, to say that history is written by the winners is only partly correct: history is, and always has been, written by those who decide who the winners actually are.

 

 

(* Very similar issues apply to the regnal lists of Scotland and Wales. Quite apart from the ‘grey areas’ in the former – e.g. Edward Balliol – the whole Scottish royal sequence has been politically charged since 1603, and not just because of the Jacobite dimension referred to earlier. My Scottish friends rightly get very upset when their King James VII is referred to indiscriminately as ‘James II’, while postboxes newly adorned with the royal cipher of ‘Elizabeth II’ were firebombed in the early 1950s by those who knew rather better than Anglocentric Post Office apparatchiks that Scotland never had a previous Queen Elizabeth… As for Wales, the traditional description of Llywellyn ap Gruffydd, killed in 1282, as the last native Prince of Wales, is very much a construct of English conquest. His brother Dafydd was proclaimed Prince after Llywellyn’s death, and could be legitimately regarded as such until his own death in the following year, while the proclamation of Owain Glyndŵr in 1400 muddied the waters even more. Indeed, the pendulum has now swung the other way, and it’s become ‘politically correct’ in Wales to refer categorically to the latter as the last prince – a line taken even in such a seemingly innocuous context as the Christmas quiz on S4C, the Welsh TV channel.)

Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Uncategorized Tagged With: fake news, kings and queens of england, post-truth, Tudors

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