‘Montaigne, captain. Michel de Montaigne.’
‘What was it he said? I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’
‘To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing; we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are all blockheads.’
‘That was it. Damned odd.’
Thomas grinned. ‘Not so odd, captain, when you think about it. Now I must escape before one of your men knocks me down and sits on me. Goodbye, captain.’
‘Goodbye, Master Hill.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Hazard
By the seventeenth century, the game of Hazard had become popular at all levels of society. Francis Fayne and his companions played a version in which the ‘caster’ or thrower of the dice chooses the ‘main’; in other versions the caster may throw the dice to establish the main.
The rules of the game are such that a sensible caster always chooses a main of seven; Francis Fayne did not always choose seven because the odds against the caster winning with a main of five, six, eight, or nine are slightly longer and thus yield a better return if he is successful.
An explanation of the game can be found in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia.
Coroners
In cases of unnatural death the ancient office of Coroner combined the duties of policeman, detective, forensic scientist and magistrate. The Coroner summoned a jury to consider such cases, which might then be referred to a higher court. It was the duty of anyone finding a dead body to report it to the Coroner, although during the Civil War this of course did not always happen.
Having been tipped off by Tobias Rush, Henry Pearson ordered Thomas’s detention until a jury could be summoned. Deaths among prisoners in Oxford gaol awaiting trial were very common, thus saving the courts time and money.
Catholics and Religious Houses
The bloody catholic uprising in Ireland in 1641 sparked a return to the persecution of English Catholics and by a Proclamation of that year all catholic priests were ordered to leave the country. But there were an estimated 30,000 practising catholics in England, and the fact that nine priests (including Franciscans) were executed in 1642 shows that some of the bravest were prepared to stay. When he could, the king invariably commuted death sentences on priests to deportation.
There were brutal attacks on ‘as well protestants as papists’ – by looters and vandals as often as by religious fanatics – and there was fear in many parts of the country of a return to catholic rule. Yet catholics rallied around both king and parliament. The devout Marquess of Winchester, for example, led a regiment of practising catholics, ministered to by a catholic priest for the king, and the controversial priest Thomas White (Blacklo) led a group of catholics who supported Parliament. The fearless and devoted Simon de Pointz actually left England with the queen in 1641 and returned with her and her catholic court two years later. Simon not only clings to the old Franciscan way of poverty (as some did), but also insists on wearing his habit. Perhaps he thinks that his ‘pragmatism and humour’, as well as the queen, will keep him safe. Thomas Hill, who at Oxford ‘attends chapel only because he has to’ and has no conventional faith, is a man of fiercely independent mind and is not prepared to be told with whom he may or may not consort. Perverse or not, they are men who, like the Quakers, Baptists, Ranters and others, lived by their own principles, not someone else’s. And they did make it safely to Oxford.
Abbeys
Although Thomas Cromwell, on the orders of Henry VIII, masterminded the dissolution of all the religious houses in England, a number of abbey buildings, especially near large towns, did survive. Some, like Romsey, were purchased by the local people and used as their church; others were bought by wealthy landowners seeking to expand their estates.
I have taken the liberty of assuming that the abbey house near Norwich which sheltered a young Simon de Pointz, and the abbey near Botley at which Thomas was hidden, were among those that survived, and that, a hundred years later, friars and monks had quietly returned to them. They would certainly have had the blessing of the devout Queen Henrietta Maria.
The Vigenère Square
The Vigenère square, which gave Thomas so much trouble, was perfected by Blaise de Vigenère, a French cryptographer, in the middle of the sixteenth century. Other than Thomas, no one found a way of breaking the cipher until the nineteenth century, when the remarkable and eccentric Charles Babbage did so, using much the same technique, just to prove that he could.
In fact, the cipher was never used very much, partly because it is laborious to encrypt and decrypt, and partly because other, equally secure ciphers were developed.
Thomas was fortunate in three respects. In the first message he found as many as eight repeated letter sequences, and the key letters E, A and T were easily found. Having identified these, he was able to find the displacement and thus the keyword, PARIS. It might not have been so.
He was also fortunate in missing a ninth repetition – EKW – which, by chance, was an anomaly. It is possible for different sequences of plain-text letters to be encrypted with the same cipher-text letters, and in this case the letter distance between the two appearances of EKW was sixty-four, which is not divisible by five, and might therefore have delayed Thomas further or even thrown him off the scent entirely. Of such small things history is sometimes made.
The second, much shorter message he could not decrypt by analysis, and managed it only with an inspired guess.
Weaponry and Uniforms
In addition to cannon and mortars, the principal weapons used by both sides in the war were muskets – both flintlocks and matchlocks – light calivers, flintlock pistols, swords, halberds and pikes. Pikes could be any length from ten feet to twenty and were often cut down by the pikemen to make them more manageable. Only a very strong man could wield a twenty-foot pike effectively.
Uniforms, usually in the form of coats dyed the same colour, were worn by both sides from the start of the war. The King’s Lifeguards, for example, wore red coats and Prince Rupert’s Regiment blue coats. These were typically made of wool, although officers might wear cotton or linen in any colour they liked. Sometimes coloured sashes were worn in battle to make telling friend from foe less hazardous, although in the heat and dust almost everything turned black or grey.
REFERENCES
Among the many books and other sources I consulted, I should mention:
Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch
Ivan Roots, The Great Rebellion 1642–1660
Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History
Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire
Iris Brooke, English Costume of the Seventeenth Century
Simon Singh, The Code Book
Stephen Pincock, Codebreaker: The History of Codes and Ciphers
David Lindley (ed.), Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–40
Peter Young & Richard Holmes, The English Civil War
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In writing The King’s Spy, I am grateful, first and foremost, to my wife Susan for her patient support. My daughter Laura and son Tom were also very helpful with suggestions and observations, as was my brother Michael.
Without exception, those to whom I turned for information or advice went out of their way to help, including the Romsey Library, Pembroke, Christ Church and Merton Colleges, Oxford, the Coroners’ Society of England and Wales and the Sealed Knot Society, and I thank them. The book might never have seen the light of day without the support of Fraser Jansen of Waterstones, to whom I owe a very special thank-you.
I am immensely fortunate to have Emma Buckley as my editor. It has been a pleasure working with her and her colleagues at Transworld.
About the Author
After reading Law at Cambridge University, Andrew Swanston held various positions in the book trade, including being a director of Waterstone’s and chairman of Methven’s PLC, before turning to full-time writing. I
nspired by a lifelong interest in seventeenth-century history, his Thomas Hill novels are set during the English Civil War, and the early period of the Restoration. He lives with his wife in Surrey.
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THE KING’S SPY
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552166102
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446487273
First published in Great Britain as The King’s Codebreaker
by Andrew Douglas in 2010 by Matador
Published in Great Britain in 2012 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Corgi paperback edition published 2013
Copyright © Andrew Swanston 2012
Maps by John Taylor
Andrew Swanston has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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