The Bleeding Land (54 page)

There is no getting away from it. The period of great upheaval, of political, religious and social turmoil that we now call the English Civil War (though some historians would rather, and with some valid argument, term it the British civil wars) was a messy business. The inferno of strife that wreaked havoc in England in the mid-seventeenth century was kindled from many flames, but the result was singularly devastating. Families, villages and towns were destroyed. Almost a quarter of a million lives were lost as King and Parliament went to war for their religious and political ideals. In the end, the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, replaced by a republic and personal military rule under Oliver Cromwell; a rule that was in the event perhaps as contentious as that of the man he had executed. The traditional authority of Church and state was overthrown and in their place novel philosophies were given breath. New ideas about religion, politics and society grew and flourished. We even saw the birth of a free press. And, crucially, for the first time all these things were accessible to the lower or middling sorts, the tradesmen and tenant farmers and all those ordinary folk who had previously been more or less voiceless. Indeed, the period of conflict that blighted the years between 1642 and 1651, touching every part
of
the British Isles, has been described as the bloody battle for the soul of the nation. But what caused the conflict in the first place? What made men and women, highborn and low, take up arms against their fellow countrymen? Why did they mass in the fields with pike and musket, or lay siege to great houses with cannon and shot?

Well, frankly, this is the really messy part. The reasons are many and complicated.

The public, especially the Puritans, didn’t like having a Catholic queen and thought Charles sympathetic towards her faith. Some even believed Charles was himself secretly Catholic, and the fear of a Catholic uprising
was
very real. Another contributing factor was the ever-increasing friction between King and a Parliament he would rather have done without. Many resented their king levying taxes without Parliamentary consent, saw Ship Money and the Forced Loan as harshly oppressive amongst divers unlawful revenue-raising designs. Particularly worthy of note (and the climax of years of tension) are the events of 4 January 1642, when Charles entered the Commons to arrest five MPs whom he accused of treason. Though the members in question were not present (the King is recorded as saying ‘I see the birds have flown’), this action turned most of Parliament against Charles because it was held to be a breach of Parliamentary privilege. Soon after this King Charles fled the capital and seven months later the country was at war with itself, a conflict unique in British history.

But I’m not an historian and I’m not here to discuss the causes of the English Civil War. There is an abundance of non-fiction that does that superbly well. From Diane Purkiss’s breathtakingly touching people’s history of the English Civil War, to Trevor Royle’s vivid and masterly account in
Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms
, there is no shortage of excellent material on the subject. For me though, when it comes to this extraordinary conflict, the family is where the drama is. There are many accounts of families being ripped
apart
, of brother against brother and of father against son, the most famous example being the Verneys, from whom many thousands of letters survive, giving us an insight into their trials and tribulations. One of the ideas that I wanted to explore was the complexity of familial duty (and love) set against the pull of ideology, social pressures, or darker motives such as revenge. How far would my characters be prepared to go for a cause, for each other, for survival itself? How strong are bonds of blood amidst what must seem like the chaotic collapse of civilization, or even, as some believed at the time, the end of days as brought about by Man’s sin? To my mind, the English Civil War provides the most perfectly dramatic backcloth against which to explore these issues, particularly because what has been somewhat lacking on the bookshelves, in my humble opinion, is real gut-wrenching English Civil War fiction; tales that pull you back to those turbulent days by the scruff of your neck and throw you into the massed ranks. I find this surprising, not only because the subject is surely fertile ground for the adventure fiction writer, but also because the period was so pivotal in this nation’s history. And yet whilst watching the TV quiz show
QI
I was amazed and horrified to learn that 90 per cent of Britons cannot name a single battle in the English Civil War, 80 per cent do not know which English king was executed by Parliament, and 67 per cent of schoolchildren have never heard of Oliver Cromwell! If anything, though, these alarming statistics made me even more convinced of the validity of the story I was writing, despite my subject choice no doubt surprising some of my readers. After all, it’s quite a leap from Vikings! Nevertheless, when I told Bill, my agent, and my editor, Simon, that I wanted to ‘do’ the English Civil War next they were both so enthusiastic about the idea that I could not wait to get into the thick of it.

However, a lifelong interest in the period and events had not prepared me for the challenges and rewards of writing a tale about them. As I have already mentioned, the English Civil
War
is an unwieldy subject, which is perhaps why historical adventure novelists have, in the main, left it alone. Perhaps it was inevitable, but I soon found that I was never going to be able to cover as much ground in the first book as I had initially planned. This was because the three main characters, from whose perspectives we view the events, demanded to be heard. Whereas I had thought to march from battle to battle, from the bloodbath of Edgehill to the cut and dash of Brentford, I found that Edmund, Tom and Elizabeth Rivers had their own ideas and, for better or worse, depending on what type of book you were hoping for, I allowed them the space they sought. I found myself moved when writing of their struggles, admittedly a new experience for me. Some of this is perhaps down to being a father myself these days, the arrival of my little girl, Freyja, having no doubt softened me up. Moreover, sometimes when writing a particularly gruesome scene (the hanging, drawing and quartering in this book springs to mind!), I even horrified myself, thinking,
gosh, this is just appalling, I hope Freyja never reads it
! But perhaps an even stronger reason for my own empathy, even sympathy, towards my characters is again due in part to the contrast between this book and those making up my
Raven
saga. The Viking books come with a certain level of expectation. That is to say, the protagonists are Vikings and so you expect them to wilfully pillage and slaughter. Acts of sudden violence are a prerequisite, all part of the job (and yes, remember that Viking is a job description, not the name of a people). In short, with that lot you expect bad behaviour – indeed it may be why you bought the books. In this novel, though, the principal characters are by comparison civilized, normal people (if you can consider a family of Lancashire gentry normal). They are victims of events beyond their control. They become caught up in a terrible war that sees them – Tom and Mun at least – all of a sudden having to shoot dead other human beings, or hack into them with cold, sharp steel. Because the violence is not casual, when it
does
come it is all the more shocking. And by that token it has a more discernible effect on those suddenly engaged in it. Of course, when it comes to the battles I have taken certain liberties for dramatic effect. For instance, in reality a person’s entire experience of the wars might have been a brief (yet no doubt terrifying) skirmish along some nameless country lane. Tom and Mun on the other hand are subject to what I call the ‘Sharpe effect’, that is of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unluckily for them, but for the sake of the drama in the tale, they will experience many of the major battles that serve as markers throughout this series. However, having said that that is stretching reality a little, there is no doubt that the likes of Cromwell and Prince Rupert were themselves present at numerous fights and survived very many potentially life-threatening actions, so perhaps Mun and Tom’s involvement is not so unbelievable after all.

There were other marked differences in writing this book, one being the language itself. In the
Raven
saga I very purposefully chose language that would ‘feel’ right for the period and the people. Its quality had to be at times quite harsh and abrasive, to give at least an impression of Old Norse or Anglo Saxon. Often the obvious word would, in the writing, look incongruous, its very sense seeming anachronistic. Even though no Viking ever uttered a single word that you’ll find in the novels, I chose the language carefully to weave a certain impression. In this novel I was suddenly presented with an infinitely broader palette with which to paint; the vocabulary bag was much deeper. I’m not saying there was no poetry in the
Raven
prose – there certainly was – but in
The Bleeding Land
I was given relatively free rein and it was thrilling.

Well, I say free rein but it’s rarely as straightforward as that. When writing historical fiction one very often has to make difficult choices regarding terminology. Let me give you an example. My copy-editor said that, to her, some of the spellings I had used felt too self-consciously archaic. My use of ‘pott’
(helmet)
was one such, and so we agreed to stick with ‘pot’. She did let me get away with ‘poll-axe’ (though with added hyphen), but noted that, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, ‘pole-axe’ had taken over as the most common spelling by 1625. However, I’ve seen the word in contemporary texts written ‘poll axe’, ‘pole-axe’ and ‘pollaxe’. Another case in point was ‘snapsack.’ Now, then, if you were to go to a re-enactment event you would see the soldiers equipped with a simple tube of canvas or leather that is secured at each end and carried across the back by a stout leather strap. In this bag the soldier carries everything he needs on the march, including spare clothing, money, flint, steel and charcloth, a wooden bowl and spoon, leather bottle, blanket, etc. Generally, a soldier was to carry three days’ provisions in his ‘snapsack’. However, according to
OED
, the word ‘snapsack’ only came into common (written) usage about a decade after the events of this book. The suggestion was that since ‘knapsack’ is the older word for the same object and still current, it seemed preferable. I didn’t disagree (though still admit to being curiously fond of ‘snapsack’).

As you can see, there are occasions when the author has to decide whether he or she wants to please the period expert by using the lingo in which he or she is immersed, or the general reader who might find unfamiliar terms awkward or confusing. I hope I have struck an acceptable balance.

What else? Well, the environment and the landscape itself was a marked contrast. Charles I’s London is a far cry from the pastoral, agrarian world of ninth-century Mercia or Frankia. In fact, my agent told me that in this book London itself is almost a character. I know what he means. Of course, this often complicated matters for the author. The seventeenth-century urban environment is sufficiently familiar to us to let us think we can picture it, but it has changed more than enough to make the research somewhat of a headache. Let us not forget that some twenty-four years after the bulk of this novel is set,
the
Great Fire gutted London, specifically the central parts of the city within the old Roman wall, all but obliterating the medieval city. Sometimes one has to dig a little beneath the ashes for answers.

Which leads me to a confession or three. Whilst I have tried to convey the events in this book as we understand them today, at least in historical terms, I have at times exercised a novelist’s prerogative and am guilty of a little conflation of events for dramatic purposes. The Grand Remonstrance was passed in November, but the Root and Branch petition and Colonel Lunsford’s intervention were December. I closed this gap to have them happen more or less concurrently. Also, the Wormleighton skirmish actually happened the night before the Battle of Edgehill rather than four or five days earlier as in my narrative. As for the battle itself, my telling of it might not fit squarely with the traditional assumptions and indeed your own understanding of what happened on that October day in 1642. That is because after reading numerous accounts of the battle I decided to base my own version on Malcolm Wanklyn’s study in his book
Decisive Battles of the English Civil War
. Using contemporary accounts and, importantly, by methodically examining the terrain over which the battle was fought, Wanklyn has reassessed the Battle of Edgehill. And whilst his evaluation is perhaps slightly controversial, his new viewpoint questioning the perceived understanding of events, I found his account compelling. It just seemed to me to ring true and so I have followed in his boot prints to a large extent.

As for Shear House, it did not exist. However, the idea for the siege in this story is loosely inspired by the very real siege of Lathom House near Ormskirk in Lancashire in April of 1643. The episode and the defiant stand of Charlotte de la Tremoille, Countess of Derby, is one of the most celebrated of the war. For me, the proposition of writing strong, brave women was too tempting to ignore and Lady Mary’s rejection of terms for surrender is based on Lady Derby’s actual morale-boosting and
elaborate
speech of defiance delivered to the Parliamentarian Colonel Rigby. However, I don’t see much point in going through and saying which parts of the novel are based on real events and which are made up, which of the characters really existed and which are invention. An historical novel is by necessity a blending of truth (or a version of truth as it has been passed down to us) and the author’s own imagination. We have the luxury of taking real events and making them the skeleton of a story upon which we then place the flesh and, hopefully, a human face that the modern reader can recognize. That is what makes it, to my mind at least, such a rich and rewarding genre. An historical novel is an invitation to you to join the author on his or her journey to the past as it might have been. Assuming you are adhering to convention and reading this note after having read the story (my mother, frustratingly, often reads the last pages of a novel first!) I am truly honoured you accepted my invitation.