The Lion of Midnight (24 page)

Elements of the plot of
The Lion of Midnight
are based upon fact. In particular, both the size and importance of the mast-fleet that returned from Gothenburg in 1666 (actually in December, not February) are drawn directly from the historical record: Pepys’s diary details his
desperate
concern for the fleet’s safety, while the names of the ship masters and exact information about the size and dimensions of their cargoes can be found in the state papers at the National Archives, Kew. The Swedish embargo on tree-felling and the French acquisition of much of the remaining stock took place essentially as described. The battle of the
Cressy
against the
Oldenborg
and the
Faisant
is also based closely upon a real event. In May 1667 the
Princess
(Captain Henry Dawes), a Fourth Rate of similar size to the fictitious
Cressy
, was returning from Gothenburg having already fought off an attack from a Dutch fleet of no fewer than seventeen ships on her outward voyage. Off the coast of Norway she encountered two men-of-war that had been hired by the Danes from the Dutch. I have used the real name of one of these, the
Faisant
, but my
Oldenborg
was a far larger ship than the other of Dawes’s assailants (and is somewhat larger, indeed, than the real
Oldenborg
that was in the Danish fleet at the time). Dawes was killed after an hour, his left thigh blown apart by a cannonball, but before he died he uttered the words that adorn the beginning of this book and which were for many
years held up as an example to British naval captains: ‘For God’s sake, do not yield the ship to those fellows!’. The lieutenant took command, but lost both of his legs and had to give way to the master, who was killed in his turn. The gunner then took command for the remaining three hours of the engagement until the Danish ships finally stood away. Given the slaughter aboard the
Princess
, first-hand accounts of this engagement from her are inevitably lacking, so I have conflated elements of her
battle
during the outward voyage. This proved to be the only serious naval action undertaken by the Danes after war belatedly broke out between them and Charles II’s three kingdoms in September 1666; they
actually
proved to be much less of a threat than many contemporaries of them expected them to be, although matters might have been different if they had undertaken the invasion of Orkney that they seriously
contemplated
.

The ‘golden age’ of Sweden lasted from roughly 1610 to 1710. The campaigns of her warrior king Gustavus II Adolphus,
der Löwe von
Mitternacht
to his German enemies, won her vast new territories, despite her tiny population and limited natural resorces. Although Gustavus’s
intervention
in the Thirty Years War was ended abruptly by his death during the battle of Lutzen in 1632, his generals continued to win triumph after triumph in the name of his daughter Christina, who succeeded to the throne at the age of five, and later under her warrior cousin who succeeded as Karl X. Queen Christina converted to Catholicism and abdicated in 1654, spending most of the remaining thirty-four years of her life in Rome. Most, but not all: she returned to Sweden twice, in 1660-1 and 1667, on both occasions to chivvy a reluctant Riksdag (and High Chancellor Magnus De La Gardie) into paying her the full
allowance
stipulated in her abdication settlement. This remarkable document signed over to the departing queen extensive estates, including entire towns and islands, but also permitted her to retain the full title and status of a ruling monarch, with sovereign rights over her own court (a situation that she rendered notorious by ordering the summary
execution
of her aide the Marchese Mondaleschi in her presence at the palace of Fontainebleu in 1657). Christina was indeed keen to ensure Sweden’s neutrality in the second Anglo-Dutch war, but not entirely for the noble and disinterested reasons I have placed in her mouth; neutrality meant that she stood a better chance of receiving the full amounts of the
revenues
from her Swedish estates.

Christina’s two return visits to Sweden following her abdication were entirely public events, but the Vasa dynasty as a whole had a long tradition of adopting aliases and going unrecognised among ordinary people. Christina’s penchant for disguising herself as a man was
notorious
and formed the basis of the plot of the 1933 Greta Garbo film
Queen Christina
, which otherwise played fast and loose with the historical record. However, the male pseudonym of Count Dohna was adopted by the queen in both the film and in real life, and her
astonishing
horsemanship is reflected in all accounts of her life. There were persistent rumours of an affair between Christina and Count Magnus De La Gardie, although by the time in which
The Lion of Midnight
is set their relationship had become considerably more antipathetic than I have made it. Christina had other lovers of both sexes, including the Cardinal Azzolino mentioned in this book, although many – or perhaps all – of these relationships might have been platonic. I chose only to hint at the widespread beliefs that Christina’s sexuality, or indeed her very gender, might have been ambiguous; indeed, in recent years she has become something of a cult figure among the transgender community.

There are many biographies of Queen Christina. I relied primarily on the newest available in English, Veronica Buckley’s
Christina, Queen of Sweden
, as well as on the older
The Sibyl of the North
by Faith Compton Mackenzie and
Queen Christina
by Georgina Masson; for some
unaccountable
reason, however, I decided to forego the biography of her by Barbara Cartland. As for the title ‘King (or Queen) of the Swedes, Goths and Wends’, that continued to be borne by Swedish monarchs until the present incumbent, Karl XVI Gustaf, modified it to the simpler ‘King of
Sweden’ at his accession in 1973; nevertheless, the heraldic device of the ‘three crowns’ remains the emblem of Sweden and her sovereigns. There is no castle of Vasterholm, but my descriptions of its interior are based on those of Kalmar Castle; conversely, Lackö is a real place, about twelve miles north of Lidköping and ninety north-east of Gotebörg, and is still very much as it was in the days when it was the seat of Count Magnus De La Gardie,
Rikskansler
or High Chancellor of Sweden. However, I have taken considerable liberties with its internal layout.

Queen Christina did sell a vast arsenal to the royalists in 1649, and the inventory of weapons given in this book is faithful to the record. However, the agreement was negotiated solely by Patrick Ruthven, Earl of Brentford and Forth, one of the most colourful but underrated
cavalier
generals of the British civil wars. Ruthven, upon whom the character of Lord Conisbrough was partly modelled, had lived in Sweden for many years, was a favoured drinking partner of King Gustavus Adolphus, and had a daughter who was one of Christina’s favourite ladies-in-waiting. Ruthven was also a cousin of the tragic Earls of Gowrie, whose story I recounted in my non-fiction book
Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the
Ruthvens
and the Gowrie Conspiracy
. I have taken a slight liberty by placing the famous James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, in Gothenburg in May 1649; he did not arrive in the town until November, shortly before embarking on the final, tragic expedition that led to his defeat at
Carbisdale
, betrayal in Assynt and execution in Edinburgh. Montrose was hanged, drawn and quartered by forces loyal to his arch-enemy, the Earl of Argyll, who was also ostensibly fighting on the same side in the name of King Charles II. At the restoration of the monarchy in 1660
Montrose’s
remains were given a grand funeral in Saint Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, where they rest just across the nave from those of Argyll.

The character of John, Lord Bale of Baslow, is based on a real person, Thomas Grey, Lord Grey of Groby, who was actually the sole peer to sign the death warrant of King Charles the First. Unfortunately for my purposes, Grey died in 1657, so I had to create a fictional alter-ego
for him; the epitaph upon Lord Bale’s grave can be found at Castleton in the Peak District, not too many miles from the fictitious
churchyard
where I located the regicide’s burial. The characters of Peregrine, Lord Conisbrough, and Lydford North, are entirely of my invention. However, there was indeed an English embassy to Sweden at the time when
The Lion of Midnight
is set, and it had precisely the same
purpose
as that which I have assigned to Conisbrough’s, namely to try and bring Sweden into the second Anglo-Dutch war on Britain’s side. This embassy was entirely public, though, and was of considerably longer duration: Henry Coventry, brother of Sir William Coventry, secretary to the Duke of York (who appears as a character in
The Blast That Tears The Skies
), served as ambassador to the court of the Three Crowns from August 1664 until recalled in the summer of 1666. Several travellers provided detailed accounts of Sweden at almost exactly the time when
The Lion of Midnight
is set. The most illustrious of these was Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Commonwealth’s ambassador to Christina’s court in 1653-4, not long before she abdicated. The second volume of
Whitelocke’s
journal, recounting his meetings with the queen, is well known, but the first volume provides much valuable information on the city of Gothenburg and the nature of the country. (Whitelocke’s difficult voyage to Gothenburg also provided much material for the account of the
Cressy
’s stormy passage in Chapter 1.) I also called upon the
Survey of the Kingdome of Sweden
, published in 1632; Bishop John Robinson’s account of Sweden in 1688, published by the Karolinska Förbundets in 1996; and the unpublished account of the country in the 1670s by William Allestree in the National Archives, Kew, SP9/125. There are also a number of good modern histories of this period in English,
notably
Paul Douglas Lockhart’s
Sweden in the Seventeenth Century
, Robert Frost’s
The Northern Wars
and Anthony Upton’s
Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism, 1660-1697.

The
Nonsuch
of Kinghorn was an actual Scots privateer of the second Anglo-Dutch war, and her captain was indeed an Andrew Wood;
however
,
I have invented the latter’s descent from the famous Sir Andrew Wood, the subject of Nigel Tranter’s novel
The Admiral
. On the other hand Kinghorn is no more than fifteen miles from Largo in Fife where Sir Andrew had his estate, so it is entirely possible that he might have been an ancestor of my privateer captain. The remarkably successful story of the Scots privateers during this war is little known, but it is splendidly told in Steve Murdoch’s book
The Terror of the Seas: Scottish Maritime Warfare 1513-1713
(2010), to which I contributed the
foreword
. And there really was a dog entered on a ship’s books as ‘Mister Bromley’ so a captain could claim the wages, albeit not until 1675.

Late seventeenth century Gothenburg was every bit as cosmopolitan as I have made it out to be: although dominated by those of Dutch descent, like my fictional Landtshere Ter Horst, it had a large English community that included Arthur Rose, a carpenter who became a
burgomaster
of the town, and Francis Sheldon, the shipwright who later built one of the mightiest men-of-war of the age, the ill-fated
Kronan
. There was an even larger Scottish community, perhaps the most remarkable member of which was the man known to the Swedes as Hans Makleir, who had been a respected merchant in Gothenburg for over forty years. His alter ego was that of Sir John Maclean, baronet: a Maclean of Duart on Mull, he emigrated at the age of sixteen but subsequently provided substantial assistance to both the exiled Charles the Second and his tragic lieutenant Montrose, as a result of which he was rewarded with his hereditary title. Considerations of space and the demands of the narrative precluded the inclusion of the likes of Sheldon and Maclean as characters in this book, but they represent an almost forgotten strand of history, the deeply-rooted connections between seventeenth century Britain and Scandinavia.

Much of the plot of
The Lion of Midnight
was finalised during a very productive research trip to Kalmar and Gothenburg in February 2011. The superb exhibition of artefacts from the wreck of the great Swedish flagship
Kronan
at the Landsmuseum in Kalmar is much less well known than that for the
Vasa
in Stockholm, but should still be a ‘must-see’ for anyone interested in seventeenth century naval history. (However, I
cannot
entirely recommend landing at Kalmar’s tiny airport in an ancient turbo-prop aircraft during a snowstorm.) The excellent city museum and maritime museum in Gothenburg contain a great deal of useful material on the history of the city in the seventeenth century (notably the huge scale model in the former), while my account of the funeral of Lord Conisbrough at the German church is drawn from a visit to it on a day as cold as that described in this book. A special thank you to the wonderfully friendly and helpful staff at the splendid Slöttshotel in Kalmar.

I am especially grateful to Professor Steve Murdoch of the University of St Andrews, whose work on Scottish and Scandinavian history in the seventeenth century was a major inspiration for the setting of this book; our conversations over the occasional dram provided stimulating food for thought, and I trust that my inclusion of one of the ships and men mentioned in his book
The Terror of the Seas
has won me a longstanding
bet of a liquid nature! I owe another great debt to the Swedish historian Jan Glete, whom I knew and whose remarkable quantitative work on European navies in the entire early modern period, and in particular his excellent accounts of the Swedish navy, provided much material for this book. Jan Glete’s relatively early death in 2009 was a tragedy for naval scholarship; the character name of General Erik Glete is by way of a belated and inadequate tribute to him (although the polite and thoughtful Jan shared no physical or personality traits whatsoever with his namesake). As ever, Richard Endsor and Frank Fox provided
invaluable
assistance with the design, layout and armament of seventeenth century warships; particular thanks to Frank for unearthing a rare
contemporary
gun-list of the Danish navy, showing the precise distribution of ordnance of various sizes to the ships of the fleet.

The decision to set this book against the backdrop of Sweden’s ‘golden age’ probably owes a great deal – subconsciously, at least-to the time in the 1990s when the A-level History curricula in English schools were rather more flexible and varied than they are now, and I was able to inflict on several successive classes an eclectic mixture of topics which included the alleged ‘military revolution’ of the seventeenth century and also ‘the Swedish question’, 1560-1721. In truth this was really two questions which tended to be set alternately, variants on ‘why did Sweden rise?’ and ‘why did Sweden decline?’. The students did not complain; indeed, they seemed positively to enjoy the experience, and the relative ease of being able to prepare for such predictable lines of questioning
contributed
to many of them obtaining outstanding results. For my part, I thoroughly enjoyed teaching fascinating, if slightly offbeat, topics to interested and enthusiastic students; I developed an abiding interest in the history of Scandinavia and am still in touch with some of the alumni from that era, several of whom I now look upon as friends.

As always, I owe several debts of gratitude, notably to David Jenkins, my agent Peter Buckman, and my publisher Ben Yarde-Buller. My partner Wendy provided the first critical assessment of this, as of the
preceding books in the series, and gave me invaluable advice and moral support. Thanks to all, and to the readers who continue to enjoy – and in many cases, comment positively upon – ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’.

J D Davies

Bedfordshire

November 2012