Balls on a platter

Line from WIP, and Hugh Longsword is guilty of staring.

“Stop ogling, Hugh,” she said calmly. “Go to the palace, or Master Burnell will have your balls on a plate. That would be a pity. I have too much use for them.”

Today my ebook, Reiver, is featured as a Spotlight on Book Heaven, a popular blog:

REIVER on Book Heaven

Longsword 3!

The third tale of Hugh Longsword, LONGSWORD (III): HOLY WARRIOR, is now available on Kindle!

“Deus Vult - God wills it!”

1271 AD. The civil wars in England are over, and the Lord Edward has sailed to the Holy Land to save what remains of the crusader states. Abandoned by his allies, Edward insists on pushing on to Acre, one of the few cities still in Christian hands. On the way his fleet is almost destroyed by a storm, and he arrives to find Acre threatened by the host of Baibars, the all-conquering Mamluk sultan of Egypt, known as the Father of Conquest.

Among Edward’s followers is Hugh Longsword. With Acre surrounded by the Mamluks, Hugh is sent on a vital mission across hundreds of miles of enemy territory. His task is to deliver a message to the Tartars, the only power on earth that can defeat Baibars. The journey is long and dangerous, and Hugh must survive battle, treachery and the lethal agents of the Qussad, Baibars’ spy network.

LONGSWORD (III) HOLY WARRIOR is the third of the adventures of Hugh Longsword, swordsman, spy and assassin in the turbulent, war-torn 13th century.

LONGSWORD III (HOLY WARRIOR) on Amazon US

LONGSWORD (III): HOLY WARRIOR on Amazon UK

Audio review

The first review is in for the audiobook version of SOLDIER OF FORTUNE (II): THE HERETIC, narrated by Nick Denton, and it's a beauty:

"Soldier of Fortune (II): The Heretic. This is not my normal reading genre but it proved to be excellent, great story line, superb characters, and packed full of action. Up there with the best in the genre. A good entertaining listen that grips you early on and never lets go. Narration is good and all characters are distinguishable. I was given a free copy of this audiobook at my own request, and voluntarily leave this review."

SOLDIER OF FORTUNE (II): THE HERETIC on AUDIBLE

A day in the life of a voice actor...

Something different for this post. Nick Denton, the very talented voice actor currently working on my Soldier of Fortune series, has uploaded some informal footage of himself working in the studio. Well worth a watch. From about 5:20 onwards he reads some lines from Soldier of Fortune (II): The Heretic.

Nick Denton, A Voice Actor's Journey, Part 1

REIVER

Mane tossing, nostrils flaring, hooves flailing - my new novella, REIVER, has just plunged out of the stable. Set in the late 16th century, during the reign of Good Queen Bess (or Bad, depending on one's preference), REIVER follows the adventures of Richie Reade or Crowhame, otherwise known as Richie O'the Bow or Richie Crow-Bait.

Richie is one of the Border Reivers, those famous criminal gangs who made the Anglo-Scottish border a living hell and left a tremendous legacy in the form of the Border Ballads, first compiled by Sir Walter Scott in the 18th century. Bold, brutal, belligerent, the reivers lived by the sword and generally died by it, assuming the hangman didn't get them first. Richie is just such a man, and he and his followers, known as Richie's Bairns - Richie's Children - must survive treachery, blood-feud, raid and counter-raid, even as the clouds of war pile high over the Marches....

REIVER is currently available on Kindle only, but a paperback version should be available soon.

REIVER on Amazon

The Battle of Dunbar

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Dunbar, one of the lesser-known battles of the Scottish Wars of Independence. It was also the first pitched encounter between the English and Scottish forces, and the only battle to be fought in Edward I's invasion of 1296. It's a while since I 'celebrated' an anniversary on this blog, so thought I would give my take on it.

Clang, hack, slay...

First, some context. Edward's invasion of Scotland was the end result of years of haggling to and fro over the rightful claimant to the vacant Scottish throne, which ended in John Balliol being installed as King of Scots in return for acknowledging Edward as his feudal overlord. Balliol's own countrymen considered him something of a nonentity, and nicknamed him 'Toom Tabard' or the Empty Coat, mocking him for being a spineless puppet of the English king.

In fact Balliol seems to have been used by both sides: when Edward started demanding Scottish troops to aid him in his war against France, a council of twelve Scottish nobles took the decision out of Balliol's hands, refused to supply Edward with soldiers, and instead signed a treaty of mutual aid with the French.

Edward's reaction was predictably furious. Having ordered a huge army to assemble at Newcastle, he led his host up to the castle of Wark on the Tweed, where news reached him that the Scots were getting their retaliation in first: on Easter Monday a Scottish force made an unsuccessful attack on Carlisle, while bands of outriders ravaged the border with fire and sword. One English chronicler claimed that the Scots committed a particularly heinous act of savagery at Hexham, rounding up a hundred schoolboys and burning them alive in a church. The tale might have been exaggerated or plain invented as useful propaganda, but on the other hand such incidents were by no means uncommon in medieval warfare.

John Balliol or 'Toom Tabard

Edward didn't seem worried by these events. When he received a message from Balliol, in which the Scottish king formally renounced his homage, he smiled and remarked: "What folly he commits. He shall have no need to come to me, for I shall go to him."

Any Scottish atrocities were soon eclipsed by the horrors of Edward's sack of the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Seven hundred years on, this incident is still clouded by contemporary propaganda and modern nationalist sentiment - much like the later sacks of Drogheda and Wexford in Ireland. Trying to see through these mists is difficult, but what seems to have happened is that Edward initially offered the town terms of surrender. These were scornfully rejected, and a number of his sailors were killed by the people of Berwick when his ships ran aground near the harbour.

Edward, who from boyhood onward had displayed a streak of cruelty when roused, lost control of himself.  He unleashed his shock troops on the town and personally led the cavalry charge on his war-horse, Bayard: it says something for Berwick's pitiful defences that his horse was able to leap the dyke and gallop into the streets.

Three days of bloody massacre followed. It's unclear whether Edward ordered the general extermination of the citizens, or of the men of the garrison. Either way, many thousands of innocents died, and Berwick was reduced to a gory, reeking shambles. Accounts vary of what finally persuaded Edward to put an end to the bloodshed: one story claims that a group of priests appeared before him, bearing the Host and begging on their knees for him to show mercy. Another says that Edward was violently sick after witnessing a soldier run his sword through the belly of a pregnant woman, and cried out 'Laissez! Laissez' - "Let be, let be!" as the signal to halt.

Arms of John de Warenne

Whatever the state of Berwick after this orgy of destruction, the crucial port town on the Tweed was now in Edward's hands. He followed up by sending his lieutenant and drinking crony, the Earl of Surrey, to secure the castle of Dunbar, a few miles up the Tweed. Surrey, a typically hard-faced baronial ruffian who had once waved a rusty sword under the noses of Edward's lawyers when they started asking difficult questions about his ancestral rights, duly sped off with a strong body of mounted knights and men-at-arms.

A note on warfare in this era. Descriptions of medieval campaigns can sometimes come across as a bland recitation of dry facts - King Wotsit marched over here and took this castle, then this town, and then marched back again. It's difficult for us modern, civilised, 21st-century types to imagine the smell and the stench of it, the hardship and the suffering of soldiers and civilians as oversized, indisciplined feudal hosts straggled up and down the country, often in appalling weather and over bad roads, all the while losing men to guerilla attacks, disease and desertion.

Desertion in particular was a serious problem for Edward I in his Welsh and Scottish campaigns. The majority of his infantry were made up of badly armed and trained feudal levies - conscripts, essentially, townsmen and peasants, often armed with little more than knives. To counter the problem, Edward supplemented his forces with large numbers of Basque and Gascon mercenaries, and after the conquest of Wales was able to call upon the services of thousands of tough Welsh archers and spearmen. Rather than starve in their own lands and be treated as second-class citizens by English immigrants, many of the Welsh chose to enlist in the armies of their conqueror.

By 1296, then, Edward's army was a pretty formidable beast, hardened by years of campaigning in Wales and France. The king's grasp of logistics could be pretty tenuous - he once sent out orders for 60,000 infantry to be raised, when there was perhaps a third of that number of able-bodied men in the whole of England - but he knew how to lead and direct an army. The same went for Surrey, another veteran of the Baronial wars and Welsh campaigns.

The Scots, by contrast, had nothing like the same degree of warlike experience to call upon. Scotland had largely been at peace for the past century, bar a couple of minor battles against the Norwegians and the Manx, and poor old Toom Tabard wasn't blessed with military genius. Balliol was camped at Haddington with the main body of the Scottish feudal host when urgent messages reached him from the garrison at Dunbar, warning that the English were on the move.

Balliol despatched his own knights, probably led by the Comyns, to meet Surrey. The two forces came in sight of each other near the castle, and for a while engaged in a staring contest. The Scots held the high ground, and may have expected Surrey's men to withdraw rather than risking attacking such a strong position. Instead he led his men down into a gulley and across a river called the Spott Burn.

Dunbar Castle today

As they struggled across the river, the ranks of English knights started to break up. Seeing the enemy host apparently dissolve into chaos, the Scots launched an all-out charge. It must have been a pretty rare and glorious spectacle, hundreds of mounted knights streaming downhill, pennons waving, lances couched as the earth quaked under the racing hoofs of their destriers.

Alas, they were deceived. Old Surrey was something of a general as well as a hooligan, and had deliberately ordered his men to feign indiscipline when they crossed the burn. As the disorderly horde of Scots thundered down towards them, the English knights suddenly closed up again and launched a counter-charge, a difficult manoeuvre that Napoleon's cavalry might have been proud of.

It was all over in minutes. After a brief fight the Scots panicked and fled westwards to the refuge of Ettrick Forest. They probably didn't suffer many casualties: one English source boasted that ten thousand of them died, but in reality only one minor Lothian knight, Sir Patrick Graham, was slain, and a hundred Scottish lords, knights and men-at-arms taken prisoner.

The blow to Scottish arms, however brief and bloodless the actual fighting, was devastating. Berwick and Dunbar knocked the fighting spirit out of the Scots, at least for a time, and the remainder of the campaign was little more than a promenade. Edward swaggered about the country, taking castles, towns and prisoners as the fancy took him, and sent hundreds of Scottish nobles south to England as captives.

Toom Tabard, needless to say, was one of them. After having the royal arms of Scotland torn from his body in a humiliating ritual at Stracathro near Montrose, he was packed off to the Tower of London for safe keeping. Edward eventually let him go to France, where he ended his days on his family's ancestral estates in Picardy: a far more pleasant fate than most of Edward's enemies.

In the long run, Dunbar was not the decisive blow it may ave appeared at the time: a year later Surrey was embarrassed by William Wallace and Sir Andrew de Moray at Stirling Bridge, and Edward spent the rest of his life leading one army after another across the border, determined to hammer them into submission. Eventually the hammer ran out of steam, and it was left to Edward II, he of Piers Gaveston and red-hot poker fame, to finish the job of conquering Scotland. Let's just say it didn't turn out too well for him...

RIP Ripper Street

Something a bit different today. After castigating the BBC's recent efforts at historical drama - namely The Tudors and The White Queen - I thought it only fair to applaud the effort that went into Ripper Street, and mourn its premature demise. After just two series, the BBC have cancelled the show, quoting poor ratings and the need for 'creative renewal', whatever that means. 

Bye then

For those who haven't seen it, Ripper Street is a melodrama set in 1890s London, and follows the adventures of the local police of H Division in their efforts to retain a semblance of order in the chaotic, poverty-stricken slums of Whitechapel. The title derives from Jack the Ripper: though Jack himself has vanished from the streets shortly before the beginning of the first series, the police are still weighed down with guilt at their failure to catch him. That failure, as we know, was never redeemed. Inspector Frederick Abberline, who in reality was in charge of the Ripper case, features as a character, though for some reason Clive Russell plays him with a Cockney instead of a West Country accent (Abberline was from Dorset).

Frederick Abberline

The series has been much-praised for its realistic depiction of life in one of the poorest and most crime-ridden quarters of Victorian London, and for not pulling its punches in depicting the often brutal and illegal methods employed by the main character, Inspector Reid (Matthew McFayden) and his hard-nut sergeant, Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn, playing a Cockney version of Bronn in Game of Thrones). The recreation of Whitechapel itself can hardly be faulted, with its narrow, crooked streets and alleys, beggars, matchgirls, tarts, pimps, and grimy urchins. No prettied-up version of the past here. Whitechapel is liberally coated in shit, and the people look suitably grimy, pale, underfed and exhausted.

The crimes that H Division deal with are usually extremely bloody, often political - the second series in particular has dealt in themes with some relevance to 2013, with homosexuality tackled in one episode, Irish 'terrorism' in another, corrupt bankers etc  - and clumsily handled. No-one could accuse the upright, violent sobersides Reid of being a particularly brilliant detective, and I sometimes wished Sherlock Holmes would turn up (it was the right period) to sneer at his methods. However, that would probably result in Holmes being escorted to the cells by Drake for a quick beating.

No, Reid, that is not a clue

I'm not wholly convinced that the series is as realistic as it claims. Despite all the stabbings and garrottings and gory fistfights, it is sometimes guilty of the usual sin of TV historical drama i.e. imposing modern values on the past. Episode Five of Series Two, 'Threads of Silk and Gold', was particularly guilty of this. Dealing with the issue of (male) child prostitution, it packs in as many abusive Victorian terms for homosexuals as possible, and depicts Sergeant Drake as a casual homophobe. Being an innately decent man, however, despite his rough habits, he eventually learns the error of his ways and appreciates that gay people are no different from the rest of us. This is designed to appeal to the thinking of a modern audience, and bears no relation to the grim reality of 19th century attitudes towards homosexuality: the chances of a rough, uneducated Whitechapel police sergeant changing his attitude towards 'mollies' were about as great as mine are of winning the Eurovision Song Contest.

Nit-picking aside, Ripper Street was a compelling watch, and got better as it went on, losing the slightly disjointed feel of the first series and successfully fleshing out the characters. One of my peeves was Adam Rothenberg, playing the dissolute American surgeon/rogue Captain Homer Jackson. He was practically inaudible in some of the earlier episodes, speaking through his nose while chewing on a cigar, but someone seems to have told him to speak up. Once I could hear what he was actually saying, the darkness and cruel wit of Jackson came into sharp focus.

Overall, then, the ambition and gorgeous production values of Ripper Street are to be applauded, even if it occasionally fell flat. The cancelled third series, with all the bugs ironed out, could have been spectacular, but the BBC apparently knows better than we mere peasants. More space is needed in the schedules for the likes of Strictly Come MasterChef Celebrity Dancing (or whatever) so you can stick your interesting, well-made, thoughtful period dramas, and get ready for a further barrage of glittery tat.

PS: Just caught a story in The Guardian that the producers of Ripper Street are in talks with LoveFilm to film a third and maybe even fourth series, so perhaps all is not lost...

The Wrath of God

The second in my series of novellas about Robin Hood, titled "The Wrath of God", is now available on Amazon. Those who have read Part One will know that this version of the legend is rather different. It is set in the mid-1220s, as opposed to the usual Richard I/King John timeframe, and incorporates real events and people from the time, such as Fulk Fitzwarin (a ballad hero in his own right), Henry III and Hubert de Burgh. 

If Part One was only slightly merry, then Part Two has no merry at all. That's not because I wanted to take the fun out of Robin Hood, but because any honest depiction of the times demanded it. The thirteenth century was a grim epoch, in England and elsewhere, and the early years of Henry III's reign were no exception.

Pope Gregory IX. Not as cuddly as he looks

Two fascinating events during this period were the foundation of the papal inquisition (the direct forerunner of the Holy Inquisition that later gained such notoriety in Spain and her colonies in the Americas) by Pope Gregory IX, and the anti-papal riots in the north of England. I wanted to include both in my story. Robin Hood takes it upon himself to lead raids on church property in Nottinghamshire, and in response the Pope sends a ruthless inquisitor to hunt down The Hooded Man, as Robin has become known, and consign his body to the flames.

The arms of Thweng of Kilton

Robin's activities are inspired by a real-life Yorkshire knight named Sir Robert Thweng, of Kilton Castle in Holderness. In 1232, a few years after my story is set, Thweng assumed the nickname 'William Wither' and led gangs of men in raids upon grain-stores owned by the church, giving the stolen grain away free to the poor or selling it off cheap. The raids were a protest against the wholesale farming out of English church benefices and land to Italian clergymen, part of Henry III's attempt to curry favour with the Pope, and proved wildly popular. Instead of being arrested or executed, Thweng eventually gained a pardon and was restored to favour. There were rumours that the Justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, was in secret correspondence with the rioters, which might explain the leniency shown to Thweng. One of his descendants, the splendidly-named Sir Marmaduke Thweng, was to earn distinction as just about the only English knight to perform with credit at the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

Papal justice

The story of the founding of the inquisition is a darker one. As opposed to the earlier episcopal inquisition, whereby local church authorities dealt with heresy, Pope Gregory wanted to create a more efficient centralised organisation that could send out 'trouble-shooters' to stamp out opposition to papal authority wherever it arose. One of his most ruthless servants was Konrad Von Marburg, a German priest and nobleman who was despatched to suppress heresies in Germany and Southern France during the Albigensian Crusade.

Von Marburg's methods were pitiless and savage, and he was an expert at whipping up popular outrage against so-called heretics. His fictional protégé, Odo de Sablé, is sent by Pope Gregory to destroy the Hooded Man and restore some respect for the papacy in England...

Robin Hood (II): The Wrath of God

Fact vs Fiction

This is a bit late, since The Tudors and The White Queen are no longer on our screens, but today I wanted to talk a bit about these shows (and others like them) and the way they affect our general understanding of the past. Since The White Queen is the more recent, I've chosen to concentrate on that.

Bollocks

I was no great fan of the series, or Philippa Gregory's version of events surrounding the disappearance of Edward V and his brother in 1483. Call me a thumpingly literal-minded traditionalist, but so far as I'm concerned those boys were murdered shortly before the accession of Richard III, and on Richard's orders. There is no evidence for their assassination, of course, and none is likely to come to light, but they vanished from public view while under the care and 'protection' of their uncle. It was Richard who had the means, the motive and the opportunity - something I might devote a future blog post to.

Gregory takes a different view, and has the elder of the boys, Edward, smothered by agents of the Duke of Buckingham, while his brother Richard is smuggled abroad and later regenerates, Doctor Who-style, as Perkin Warbeck, bane of Henry VII. This is by no means the wildest of the many and various alternative theories about the fate of the princes - they range from death by cancer to the INSANE Margaret Beaufort keeping the boys as pets in her own private dungeon - but was depicted on the programme as solemn, unimpeachable fact.*

The entire sequence was irritating, as well as muddled and badly-filmed, but Gregory is a shrewd operator, and well aware that you can't show Richard III doing bad things in the current climate. We're going to get Saint Dickon from now on, come what may.

Far worse was TWQ's other digressions from the official record. Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Elizabeth Woodville's mother, who was indeed accused of witchcraft in her lifetime, is shown as an actual functioning witch, capable of summoning up mists and storms at sea. She passes her powers on to her daughter and grand-daughter, who together use magic to scupper Henry Tudor's invasion of 1483. Elizabeth of York, Henry's future wife, manages to predict the advent of the Virgin Queen and the end of the Tudor dynasty, thus giving those upset by Richard III's death in battle something to cheer. This isn't merely changing history, but asking viewers to believe in magic. Actual magic.

So to Bosworth, the nadir of the series and possibly the all-time worst battle sequence ever filmed: even worse than the ladies of the Women's Institute in Monty Python, who re-enacted historical battles by attacking each other with handbags. To be fair, the BBC clearly lacked the budget to stage the battle properly - that would require a cast of thousands - but in that case it shouldn't have been attempted. The sight of about thirty extras running around a snowy forest (snow, in August) throwing packets of fake blood at each other before Lord Stanley came charging to Tudor's rescue with his mighty retinue of five dudes, set me chuckling and harrumphing for hours.

Turning away from the horrors of The White Queen, we have The Tudors, the most recent attempt to dramatise the life of Henry VIII. Bluff King Hal has appeared many times on screen, perhaps the best being Keith Michell's performance as the aging king through all the stages of his life, back in the 1970s. The '70s was the high point of 'responsible' historical drama, with the fiery Angevins depicted in the 'The Devil's Crown', starring Brian Cox as Henry II, and 'Shadow of the Tower', with an astonishing performance by James Maxwell as Henry VII. Stagey and low-budget these shows may appear now, but the quality of the scripts, acting and research are on a different planet to that served up by modern dramas.

Back to The Tudors, and the central performance by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry. Quite apart from the the factual errors littered throughout the show - Henry's sisters are merged into one for convenience, and Cardinal Wolsey is shown cutting his own throat - Meyers is the big problem. A fine actor in his own right, he neither looks like Henry, and fails to convince as Henry, no matter how loudly or often he storms about, chewing up the scenery. In fact his Henry comes across as a bit of a whining prat, no more so than when he insists on vaulting a river to continue hunting, and ends up face-down in the drink. The best is saved for last, when Meyers deals with Henry's weight and health problems in later life by limping about with a cane and adopting a strange faux-Irish accent. At no point does he lose his sexy six-pack or suffer any loss in looks, besides a touch of Just For Men-style grey at the temples.

Other than venting - hey, this is my blog and I'll vent if I want to - my point is to ask this question: what makes for good, compelling historical drama? One in which events and personages are significantly altered, sometimes beyond recognition, or in which the 'true' story is told with as much accuracy and honesty as possible, known facts permitting?

Perhaps there is no 'right' answer - I have heard it said recently that without conjecture, any historical drama will lack interest - but I know which way I lean...especially if guff like The White Queen is fated to be the norm from now on.

Any thoughts welcome :)

* The portrayal of Margaret Beaufort needs little comment from me. It will surely go down in TV history as one of the most eccentric, crazed depictions of a historical character ever committed to screen.

EVIL