Destiny's Tide

by Destiny's Tide (retail) (epub)

  Writing naval historical fiction set in the sixteenth century is problematic on several levels. We often have little evidence of how things were done; many treatises relating to how ships were sailed and fought date only from the seventeenth century, and although one can sometimes extrapolate that X is surely likely to have been done in the same way eighty or a hundred years earlier, it is dangerous to make that assumption in all cases. Above all, the way in which naval warfare was carried out was very different, and the very word ‘navy’ itself had a distinctly different meaning, in the period covered in this book to that described in my series of novels set in the late seventeenth century, ‘the Journals of Matthew Quinton’. Firstly, seaborne ordnance was still a relatively recent and somewhat unreliable innovation, ships carried few heavy guns in comparison with the later period, and tactics therefore relied heavily upon boarding. Secondly, what might be described as England’s maritime fighting force consisted of a combination of the ships personally owned by the monarch – in a strict semantic sense, the true ‘Navy Royal’ – and those owned by towns or individual shipowners, taken up for clearly defined periods (generally as short as possible, to save the Crown money) and for specific purposes, such as, in this story, the invasion of Scotland, or the siege of Boulogne. But this essentially medieval, and essentially temporary, fighting force was already evolving and expanding into something very different, a fact borne out by the story of the second family at the heart of this book, the Gonsons, who, unlike the Stannards of Dunwich, were real historical figures.

  William Gonson, originally of Melton Mowbray, held the various offices that I have attributed to him, including that of vice-admiral of Norfolk and Suffolk (the first ‘vice-admiral of the coast’ ever appointed). He was largely responsible for day-to-day naval administration for the majority of Henry VIII’s reign, a burden that increased substantially during the 1530s and 1540s as the king faced increasing threats from abroad, culminating in fighting wars against Scotland and France simultaneously. Gonson’s final years were also lived under the shadow of the execution of one of his sons, David, a Knight of the Order of Saint John, for treason. David, who commanded warships of the Order in the Mediterranean in the 1530s, returned to England in 1540, but was arrested on trumped-up charges brought by his fellow knight, Sir Philip Babington, who had deserted the Order a little earlier and who seems to have been acting as a paid agent of Henry VIII’s government, tasked with denouncing his erstwhile comrades. A number of quarrels between Gonson and Babington are recorded in the Order’s records, including one in which Gonson slapped Babington with the flat of his dagger hilt. The treason proceedings against David Gonson were brought under the dubious new procedure of attainder, and he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Saint Thomas-a-Watering, on the boundary between Camberwell and Newington, on 12 July 1541. The Sovereign Military Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, otherwise known today as the Knights of Malta, regards him as one of its martyrs, and commemorates him on the anniversary of his execution; he was made Blessed by Pope Pius XI in 1929.

  William Gonson certainly committed suicide some time in the summer of 1544, although I have invented the circumstances. Such a death would normally have resulted in the body being buried with a stake through the heart at a local crossroads, but – whether as a consequence of bribery, or some other form of influence – the affair seems to have been discreetly covered up, as he was, indeed, buried in the parish church of Saint Dunstan-in-the-East, London. (John Palsgrave was the rector, and had the distinguished early career I have attributed to him, but he must have been at least complicit in the decision to give Gonson Christian burial within the precincts of his church.) Posthumous proof of the fact that the navy had grown far beyond the point where it could effectively be run by one man is provided by the rapid formation of a Council of Marine Causes, later rechristened ‘the Navy Board’, to replace Gonson. One of its earliest members, who then served the naval administration for over thirty years, was Benjamin Gonson, William’s fifth son, initially as the first-ever Surveyor of the Navy, and then, a year after the conclusion of this story and at the age of just twenty-three, its treasurer also. Ben Gonson married Ursula Hussey in the summer of 1546, and their daughter Katherine married the legendary Elizabethan ‘sea dog’, Sir John Hawkins (who will loom large in the second book of this trilogy).

  Mary Fitzroy, née Howard, Duchess of Richmond, is also a real historical figure, and Henry VIII undoubtedly did toy with the idea of resolving the potential succession crisis created by his first two wives’ failure to give him a male heir by legitimising her husband, the king’s son by Elizabeth Blount. Richmond died in 1536, aged seventeen, before the plan could bear fruit, and the birth in the following year of Edward, Prince of Wales, finally gave Henry the legitimate male heir he craved. There is no evidence that Edward visited Kenninghall Palace when he was seven years old, or at any other time, and indeed, even from a very early age, his religious views were the polar opposite of those held by almost all members of the House of Howard. (The one exception, oddly, was Duchess Mary: she seems to have been a genuine and committed convert to Protestantism.) However, the prince was almost exactly the same age as Thomas Howard, the future fourth Duke of Norfolk, so it would have been entirely possible for them to have been acquainted, if not playmates. Thomas Howard became a leading Catholic conspirator against Queen Elizabeth I, and was even touted as a potential husband for Mary, Queen of Scots, to strengthen her claim to Elizabeth’s throne. Memorably played by Christopher Eccleston in Shekhar Kapur’s film Elizabeth, Thomas was ultimately convicted of treason and executed in 1572, thus carrying on a family tradition: his father, the Earl of Surrey, had gone to the block in 1546, and the third Duke of Norfolk avoided the same fate only because King Henry VIII died on the day he was meant to be executed. At Surrey’s trial, his own sister, the Duchess of Richmond, testified against him, her evidence revealing what one writer has called her ‘vindictive and bitter’ personality. On the other hand, Surrey had once suggested that his sister should seduce the king, her father-in-law, and become his mistress, so Mary’s actions might have been a form of payback for a fraternal suggestion she found utterly outrageous. Despite this remarkable family rift, Surrey has a grand tomb in the parish church of Framlingham, Suffolk, just across the way from that of the Duke – and, yes, the Duchess – of Richmond.

  Kenninghall, a few miles east of Thetford in Norfolk, was the principal seat of the Howard dynasty in the sixteenth century. Most of the H-shaped palace was demolished in 1650, but the former service wing, where Thomas Ryman was imprisoned in my story, survives as a farmhouse.

  * * *

  The religious situation in England in 1544–5 was deeply uncertain, with both conservative and reforming parties seeking to influence the old and increasingly sickly monarch. Despite the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, much of the liturgy was still essentially Catholic, and was still in Latin. A number of ancient and much-loved practices, alluded to in the text, had been abolished, especially when Thomas Cromwell was Henry VIII’s chief minister, but many others still survived. Exhaustive detail on all of these topics can be found in Eamon Duffy’s magisterial The Stripping of the Altars, and, specifically for the situation in Dunwich and its surrounding area, Judith Middleton-Stewart’s Inward Purity and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370–1547. If the evidence of wills and other documents is insufficient, the matter is surely put beyond doubt by the number of rosaries, or paternosters, and the nature of other religious artefacts, recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose. At the time during which this story is set, then, the years 1544 and 1545, England was still essentially a Catholic country, despite its king’s break with the Roman church.

  Even so, although many still clung to the old ways, many others favoured the new teachings coming from the Continent. One of them was John Day, who does, indeed, seem to have come from Dunwich; he commissioned the earliest known history of the town. By
the mid-1540s, he was established as a printer and publisher in London, and radical Protestant works poured from his presses. After Elizabeth’s accession, he both sealed his place in history and made his own fortune by publishing Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the runaway bestseller of the age. Composers of church music had to take account of these changing fashions: Thomas Tallis, for example, famously wrote in Latin or English as required, and managed to accommodate all the religious changes from before Henry VIII’s break with Rome to Elizabeth I’s moderate Protestant settlement. For my references to this musical epoch, and to Jack Stannard’s thwarted choral ambitions, I leaned heavily on Andrew Gant’s O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music; the song Benedicite, sung by Jack in the prologue, was composed by Robert Fayrfax (1464–1521). As for the Rogationtide processional service at Saint Paul’s on 23 May 1544, almost certainly the first occasion when the liturgy was sung in English, and Queen Catherine Parr’s astonishingly forthright and belligerent prayer, See Lord and Behold, set to music by Tallis, was performed, I was fortunate enough to attend the concert by Alamire at Saint John’s, Smith Square, London, on 14 April 2017, the first modern performance of the piece following its identification by Dr David Skinner of Cambridge University.

  * * *

  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 only from H P Lovecraft’s famous and seminal tale of the supernatural, The Dunwich Horror; this took only the placename 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 merely 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 example, William Girdler and William Clampe really were the bailiffs of Dunwich in 1544–45, while Joseph Overfield and William Seaward were, indeed, parish priests of All Saints and Saint John’s respectively. However, I have taken something of a liberty with the history of the real Barne family. Although they were the principal landowners in Dunwich by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (indeed, their mausoleum occupies the principal surviving remnant of the Saint James leper hospital where Peter Stannard was a patient), there is no evidence that they were originally from the area, or had any connections there in the sixteenth century. The roots of the George Barne mentioned in this story seem to have lain in London and perhaps in Somerset; but it suited my narrative for the family to be natives of Dunwich’s hinterland.

  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the town of Dunwich experienced something of a limited revival, thanks to the success of its Iceland fishery. However, this proved short-lived; as Chapter Nine relates, the dissolution of the monasteries dramatically reduced the demand for fish, and the town’s decline resumed. Greyfriars, the monastery to which Thomas Ryman once belonged, is now the last substantial relic of old Dunwich, with its gates, refectory and enclosing wall still standing upon Dunwich cliff. (For purposes of narrative convenience, I brought forward the date of its dissolution from 1538 to October 1537; the abrupt termination of a monastery’s life in the midst of a service is a true story, albeit not from Dunwich but from Evesham Abbey, where the evensong service was abruptly terminated ‘at this verse, deposuit potentes, and [the royal agent] would not suffer them to make an end’.) However, some remains of the Maison Dieu hospital supposedly still exist beneath the beach café and adjacent public conveniences – the lane behind them is the road John Stannard would have taken to visit his father – while the sunken lane that was once Midgate Street can still be walked as far as its abrupt end at the cliff edge. All Saints, the last of what were once seven churches, lost its final rector in 1755, although burials continued in its churchyard for some time afterwards. The last grave of all, that of Jacob Forster (who died in 1796, aged thirty-eight) is still in situ, roughly in the place where John Stannard meets Thomas Ryman in Chapter One, although it is now precariously close to the cliff edge. The ruins of All Saints fell into the sea between 1904 and 1922; the last buttress was moved further inland and re-erected in the churchyard of the nineteenth century Saint James’s Church, which also contains the ruins of the leper hospital where Peter Stannard was a patient. The historical record suggests that the last leper died, or otherwise left there, in about 1536, so I took a slight liberty by bestowing the title on Peter in 1544. Similarly, Saint John’s church was certainly abandoned at some point in the mid-1540s, but there is no record that its chancel fell into the sea during a Christmas Day mass. On the other hand, to use the classic novelist’s defence, there’s no record that it didn’t, either. There is also no record of a great Doom painting in Saint John’s or any other Dunwich church, although they must have had such things at some point; I got my inspiration for the Doom of Dunwich from the astonishing Doom which can still be seen at Wenhaston Church, a few miles inland.

  Dunwich’s struggles with its rivals Southwold and Walberswick are well documented, although whether Southwold was ever a kind of Tudor cross between Dodge City and Sodom is open to debate. In any event, its more current, and thoroughly well-deserved, reputation is as one of England’s most genteel seaside resorts, where the inhabitants only become vaguely alarmed by such calamities as the arrival of the wrong kind of coffee shop or bookshop. The struggles between these three coastal communities will be revisited in the second and third stories of this trilogy. So, too, will the lives of Jack Stannard, his son Tom, his daughter Meg, and the subsequent generation of the Stannard family. However, these books will continue resolutely not to focus on the lives of two of the monarchs under whom they would have lived: nor, indeed, on the wives of the one, and the alleged lovers and actual rivals of the other. To those who are disappointed by this, I would respectfully suggest that in England and Wales, at least, there are more than enough books, films, plays, TV series, documentaries, advertisements, blogs, social media quarrels, cod ‘re-enactments’ at heritage attractions, overpriced banqueting ‘experiences’, and History syllabuses for children of pretty much every age from five to eighteen, to make good my undoubted and shocking deficiencies in this regard.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In writing this book, I’ve inevitably incurred a number of debts of gratitude. First and foremost, thanks to my agent, Peter Buckman, and to Michael Bhaskar at my publishers, Canelo, for their faith in the idea. Secondly, thanks to all those in Dunwich and its environs who helped make this story a reality. Jane Hamilton, Tim Holt-Wilson, and above all John Cary of Dunwich Museum, provided me with information and ready access to the museum’s wonderful collection of material; a visit to it is highly recommended, especially to view the splendid model of Dunwich in its heyday. Also in Suffolk, I owe a special thank you to Fran Abrams, and another to the staff of the Ship Inn at Dunwich; my fictional sixteenth-century tavern, the Pelican in its Piety, would have been on pretty much exactly the same site. Thanks also to Sarah Wright, Head of History at my old workplace, Bedford Modern School, for invaluable infor
mation on aspects of the reign of Henry VIII. I taught Tudor history there for many years, and the questions and comments of several generations of former A-level students – not quite all of them, thankfully, pertaining to the sex life of King Henry VIII – have found their way, consciously or subconsciously, into the way in which I have written this book.

  While many of the characters in this story are fictitious, some, notably the Gonson family, are not. Novelists – and, indeed, historians – sometimes write about people in the past from a detached perspective, assuming, albeit perhaps subconsciously, that it doesn’t particularly matter what one writes about those who lived so very long ago; or, as the old publishing cliché puts it, it’s impossible to libel the dead. In all of my books, I’ve tried to show respect to the memories of real historical characters, even those whom the judgement of History has labelled, fairly or unfairly, as ‘the bad guys’. But in writing this book, I’ve been more aware than usual that some of those I’ve written about have descendants alive today, who still care about their ancestors’ reputations. In particular, I came across one website relating to the burial of William Gonson at Saint Dunstan in the East, London, which included this simple but telling comment: ‘God speed, 14x great-grandfather’. I hope that if any descendants of the Gonsons, or else of those who lived, loved and died in Dunwich during the sixteenth century, read this book, they’ll feel that I’ve treated what is, after all, a part of their personal stories, with appropriate sensitivity and dignity.