Battle’s Flood
Page 25
Now, I realise that some who read this book might be offended by my decision to take this line. But with all due respect to them, it seems to me that deciding to ignore aspects of the past simply because one finds them distasteful, or – far worse – seeking deliberately to conceal or distort elements of the historical record is a markedly dangerous course of action. Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, the USSR, and pretty much every other totalitarian state in history obtained and retained power by, inter alia, omitting or distorting vast tracts of their national histories. So no matter how much one might want to, one simply cannot ‘no-platform’ the past, nor rewrite it to fit one’s modern preconceptions and prejudices.
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Historians have argued long and hard about just how quickly and deeply the English nation became Protestant. The interpretation that I have presented – namely, that very many people warmly welcomed the return of Catholicism under Mary, and that many continued to hold on to at least some aspects of the old faith for years under Elizabeth – will undoubtedly have the eminent authors of some of the books I read at school and university, and some of the great historians who taught me at the latter, spinning in their graves. If anyone doubts my take on the religious situation, though, I refer them to the series of superb and formidably researched books by Diarmaid MacCulloch. For those wedded to the legends of ‘the Virgin Queen’, ‘Gloriana’, and the ‘Protestant wind’ that scattered the Spanish Armada, it is a useful corrective to remember that Elizabeth nearly died of smallpox in October 1562, as Jack Stannard recalls in Chapter Nineteen, and if she had, then maybe Meg Stannard’s dearest wish would have been granted after all – and British history would undoubtedly have been very different indeed.
Another inconvenient truth that has often been written out of history books, and certainly out of popular consciousness, is that Philip II of Spain, the villain of the Spanish Armada (Hollywood movies, passim), once reigned as King of England, as joint (if uncrowned) sovereign with his wife Mary, but he did. Anyone who doubts this should google images of the coins of the reign, where the heads of husband and wife appear side by side. It is equally true that John Hawkins always referred to Philip as ‘my old master’, and traded shamelessly upon the relationship – undoubtedly exaggerating it furiously as he did so – in his dealings with local Spanish authorities, merchants and townspeople in the Americas.
I have (probably) played fast and loose with the historical record by having Hawkins’ father alive in April 1555, when he had almost certainly been dead for at least two months by then. The burning of William Flower, though, took place at the time, in the place, and in the circumstances that I have described; and a number of monasteries, including Westminster Abbey and the Greyfriars at Greenwich, were indeed restored in Mary’s reign, albeit only briefly. Of course, the prospects of a permanent restoration of Catholicism in England depended on Mary and Philip’s heir being Catholic, and in the spring of 1555, there was a widespread belief that the queen was pregnant and approaching full term. Latin Church music was specially composed and prayers were offered up, but by the summer, it was clear that there was no pregnancy. Nevertheless, for a few short weeks, the Catholics of England were full of hope for the future, and it is in this period that I decided to set the Prologue.
Mary actually died childless in November 1558, and was succeeded by her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth proceeded cautiously, and her own public gestures of faith were initially ambiguous. Indeed, until events from the late 1560s onwards changed the situation and pressure grew from committed Protestant statesmen like Francis Walsingham (who was a relatively minor figure in 1568), Elizabeth’s policy was best summed up by the famous sentence about not making windows into men’s souls. As long as Catholics kept a low profile and attended their local parish churches, no particular pressure was placed on them, and, except in the case of a few individuals who chanced their arms rather too boldly, they were certainly not persecuted with any great rigour. The ‘Elizabethan religious settlement’, culminating in the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, was significantly more moderate than the changes carried out in Edward VI’s reign, retaining some elements of the Catholic liturgy – which, in turn, infuriated the growing numbers of those who wished the Church of England to move towards simpler forms of worship, more in line with what they saw as the ‘best practice’ of European Protestantism. Many of these people were nicknamed ‘Puritans’ by their opponents. Francis Drake may or may not have been one of them, but he was certainly a staunch, arguably fanatical Protestant who personally converted men to that faith.
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The years 1567–9 were remarkably tumultuous, even by the standards of sixteenth-century Europe. In France, tensions were rising during an uneasy peace between the Catholic majority, its figureheads being the young King Charles IX and his mother Catherine de Medici, and the Huguenot (Protestant) minority, led by the Prince of Condé. This peace had endured, just, since the end of the so-called ‘first war of religion’ (1562–3). The fictional episode in Chapter One would have immediately preceded the outbreak of the so-called second war, following an attempt by Condé to seize the king at Meaux; a few months after my imaginary episode took place, a Huguenot coup in Antoine Mielle’s La Rochelle turned the city into the stronghold and unofficial capital of French Protestantism. Meanwhile, there was widespread rioting and iconoclasm in the Netherlands, then ruled by Spain but containing a large number of Calvinists. To quell the discontent, Philip II dispatched a powerful army led by his most famous general, the Duke of Alba. For months, rumours about this army’s destination ran like wildfire through Europe, but it ultimately reached Brussels, where Alba immediately began a brutal crackdown under the auspices of his newly instituted ‘Council of Blood’. This, in turn, triggered the outbreak of a full-scale rebellion, known in Britain as ‘the Dutch revolt’, but in the Netherlands as the beginning of its eighty-year war of independence from Spain.
In Scotland, too, there was violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Rumours of Mary Queen of Scots’ involvement in the death of her second husband, Lord Darnley, seemed to be given credence by her overhasty marriage to Darnley’s alleged murderer, the Earl of Bothwell, and led to her deposition by a party of Protestant lords. From then on, I have reported Mary’s doings in 1567–8 essentially as they happened. Meg de Andrade, née Stannard, was certainly not the only English person who secretly believed that Mary was actually already the de jure Queen of England by virtue of Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon being invalid, meaning that his marriage to Anne Boleyn was bigamous and that Elizabeth was therefore illegitimate. In 1569, not long after the events of this book take place, a rebellion arose in the north with the avowed intent of placing Mary on the English throne, and her very existence continued to pose a threat to Elizabeth until her eventual execution in 1587. Meg, and all of those who thought like her, are now usually written off in novels and films, and even in some ‘proper’ history books that should know better, as ‘traitors’: proof, as if one needed it, that history is always written by the winners.
All of this, then, was the backdrop against which Hawkins’ voyage, his third to the Caribbean, took place. Originally proposed by two shady Portuguese adventurers called Luis and Homem, the original intention was to search for fabled gold mines in west Africa. This was a remarkably persistent trope in the early modern era; long before I conceived the idea of the Stannard trilogy, a story at once similarly true and similarly mythical, albeit set almost exactly one hundred years later, formed the basis of my second ‘journal of Matthew Quinton’, The Mountain of Gold. Hawkins, though, probably always intended to turn the expedition of 1567–9 into another slaving voyage to the West Indies, having made good profits for himself – and, more importantly, for his powerful backers at court and in the City of London, including the queen – during his two previous ventures.
For the purposes of this story, I needed to insert a Stannar
d ship into John Hawkins’ squadron. To do so, I simply substituted the Jennet into the place actually occupied by the Angel, the smallest vessel on the voyage. Such an action might outrage purists and sticklers for strict historical accuracy, but I make no apologies for so doing. Similarly, and again entirely for narrative reasons, I have sometimes compressed, omitted or modified certain events during the course of the voyage, which, after all, lasted for a total of some fifteen months. To give just one example, I have slightly altered some elements of the strange confrontation between Hawkins’ ships and the Flemish squadron at Plymouth in August 1567. The Flemish admiral Wathen (or de Wachen), Lord of Campveer, did not leave his ship, but sent one of his officers – and that officer went to protest to the mayor of Plymouth before going to see Hawkins. However, Hawkins’ actions and statements aboard the Jesus are drawn closely from the historical record.
Similarly, I have compressed and sometimes omitted some of the minor operations of, and incidents experienced by, Hawkins’ fleet on the coasts of both west Africa and the Caribbean, although in most cases – including such ‘stranger than fiction’ incidents as the mock execution of Edward Dudley and the actions of even quite minor figures like Captain Antonio Delgadillo – I have adhered closely to the historical record. This is true even of the other ‘stranger than fiction’ elements in the story. For example, Hawkins really did take a personal orchestra on the voyage. I have probably underplayed those occasions when members of the expedition witnessed incontrovertible evidence of cannibalism among the African tribes they encountered, especially in the aftermath of the capture of Conga, while I apologise to Oliver Cromwell for ‘borrowing’ his famous remark about ‘stubble to our swords’ and placing it in the mouth of Robert Barrett.
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For all these events, and, indeed, for the course of the real voyage that forms the backbone of this book, I have used a wide variety of sources. Rayner Unwin’s The Defeat of John Hawkins blurs fact and fiction quite uncomfortably at times, but is the only stand-alone treatment of the voyage. There are several biographies of both Drake and Hawkins, going back to Sir Julian Corbett’s venerable Drake and the Tudor Navy and J. A. Williamson’s two gung-ho biographies of Hawkins. Among more modern works, John Sugden’s biography of Drake is detailed, perceptive and balanced; on the other hand, Harry Kelsey’s studies of both Hawkins and Drake are driven too much by the author’s attempt to project modern attitudes toward slavery into the past. For a corrective, Hugh Bicheno’s Elizabeth’s Sea Dogs provides a perceptive, well-written overview, and places Hawkins and Drake firmly within the broader milieu that they inhabited.
Otherwise, I used a number of the original primary sources on which all of these books depend to a greater or lesser extent. These included Hawkins’ own narrative, together with those of two other members of the expedition, Miles Phillips and Job Hortop. These were published in Richard Hakluyt’s famous and hugely influential The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. I also studied the manuscript account of the expedition in the British Library, Cotton MS Otho E.VIII, folios 17–41. Finally, Michael Turner’s In the Wake of Sir Francis Drake, the upshot of half a lifetime’s single-minded determination to visit and photograph every location Drake ever went to, no matter how much they might have changed and no matter how many times the author got beaten up or arrested, provided valuable insights into the geography of several of the places described in this book.
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As in Destiny’s Tide, the first book in this trilogy, most of the action on land takes place in Dunwich. It seemed to me that there was little point in writing an entirely new account of the town for this historical note, having covered this ground in the preceding title, so the section in italics that follows has been copied from that; those who have already read this can, therefore, skip the next paragraphs!
The story of Dunwich, ‘England’s Atlantis’, is not really as well known as it should be. Indeed, it’s possible that some will know the name solely from H. P. Lovecraft’s famous and seminal tale of the supernatural, ‘The Dunwich Horror’; this took only the place name from the village in Suffolk (and that probably unwittingly), otherwise setting the story in rural Massachusetts, but it has spawned two films and countless references in popular culture. As for the real Dunwich, almost certainly once the seat of the Bishops of East Anglia, as late as the thirteenth century it possessed the same geographical extent as London, was listed as one of the ten most important towns in England, and was regarded as the best harbour on the east coast. But a series of catastrophic storms, notably in 1286, 1287, 1328, 1347 and 1362, effectively blocked its harbour and swept away large areas of the town, which eventually declined to the tiny hamlet that remains today.
The story of this ‘lost city’, and its endless battle against the sea, was well told in Rowland Parker’s famous book Men of Dunwich, first published in 1978, which was an important source for this story; so, too, were Nicholas Comfort’s The Lost City of Dunwich, Thomas Gardner’s An Historical Account of Dunwich (first published in 1754), and many archaeological reports on the digs and surveys, including those underwater, carried out at Dunwich over many years. Thanks to these sources, many of the character names in this story are taken from real people who lived there at the right time. Indeed, some of them held the actual offices I have attributed to them.
For instance, Thomas Cowper and John Bradley served as bailiffs of Dunwich in 1568, while William James was probably the rector of St Peter’s church at this time. Similarly, Sir George Barne and Sir William Garrard were Lord Mayor of London in the years given, the Duke of Alba was indeed the head of Philip II’s household when he was King of England, and so on. John Day, who was almost certainly born at Dunwich, published Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, dominated the London book trade for years, and bought extensive country estates, somehow finding time to do all this in between fathering twenty-six children by his two wives. The inscription on his memorial at Little Bradley church, Suffolk, is a delightful window to the age (I have modernised the spelling):
Here lies the DAY that darkness could not blind
When popish fogs had over cast the sun
This DAY the cruel night did leave behind
To view and show what bloody Acts were done
He set a Fox to write how Martyrs run
By death to life Fox ventured pains & health
To give them light DAY spent in print his wealth
But God with gain returned his wealth again
And gave to him as he gave to the poor
Two wives he had partakers of his pain
Each wife twelve babes and each of them one more
Alice was the last increaser of his Store
Who mourning long for being left alone
Set up this tombe herself turned to a STONE.
obiit July 1584.
Otherwise, the characters of Philip Grimes and Stephen Raker are fictitious, and the Blackfriars of Dunwich was actually sold off relatively quickly after its dissolution, rather than remaining unsold for years.
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Finally, I am aware that some readers might be surprised, if not shocked, by my presentation of Francis Drake as one of the ‘bad guys’ of this story. In my defence, I would point out that, at the time when the events of this book are set, Drake was still a relatively young man, probably no older than his mid-twenties. His great days and great voyages were all still ahead of him, and it is very likely that his character and attitudes were not yet fully formed; indeed, one of his biographers has suggested that the action at San Juan de Ulúa (the strictly correct Spanish spelling of the name) was the great turning point of his life, setting him on an anti-Spanish crusade that drove him until his dying day. Whether or not that is the case, it’s certainly true that even some of Drake’s most devoted enthusiasts describe him as ‘ruthless, vainglorious, an attention seeker [who] tended to boast… too fond of his own ideas and uncollegial’ (website of the Drake Exploration
Society).
It is certainly true that I have attributed to Drake actions, statements and attitudes for which no evidence whatsoever exists, and his refusal to let Tom Stannard and his men board the Judith is, of course, wholly fictitious (although the ship’s night-time departure from San Juan de Ulúa, which even Hawkins regarded as a betrayal, is not). Conversely, I don’t believe that I’ve directly contradicted the evidence either; after all, this is a novel, not a work of history, and this is what novelists do. Besides, there’s a part of me that is still the little boy who avidly watched the 1960s TV series Sir Francis Drake, starring Terence Morgan, so I’m certainly not interested in knocking Drake off any pedestals!
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The Stannards will return in the final book of this trilogy, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Acknowledgements
Thanks once again to my agent, Peter Buckman, and to Michael Bhaskar and Kit Nevile at my publishers, Canelo, for their ongoing support. Secondly, I reiterate the thanks I paid in Destiny’s Tide to those in Dunwich and its environs who helped make this story a reality, notably Jane Hamilton, Tim Holt-Wilson, and above all, John Cary of Dunwich Museum. My thoughts on Sir Francis Drake, the less savoury aspects of his career, and the sixteenth-century maritime connections of Devon were given much sharper focus by the workshop that I attended in May 2019 at Buckland Abbey, the house that Drake purchased. My thanks to Julie Farguson, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and the other organisers for setting up the day and inviting me to this excellent event, part of the ‘Making Maritime Memories’ collaboration between the National Trust and the University of Oxford. Thanks, too, to Hugh Bicheno, author of Elizabeth’s Sea Dogs, who has been an assiduous reviewer of the first book and a thorough, forthright and perceptive ‘beta reader’ of this one. As ever, though, my principal ‘thank you’ is to Wendy, both for her direct input and for her moral support.