Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

Ash Wednesday, by Deborah Swift

  Cat and Mouse, by Tim Vicary

  The Blood upon the Rose, by Tim Vicary

  The Exile’s Daughter, by John Wheatley

  Jane Austen and Ghosts, by David W. Wilkin

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  Castles, Customs, and Kings

  True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

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  Falling in Love with England and Its History

  by Stephanie Cowell

  It began when I was very young; I felt I did not belong in New York City where I was born but somewhere across the sea in that land called England. But what was England to me? Any place for which we long is formed from fragments which mysteriously arrive and become part of us.

  My first sense of England was literature, of course: Sara Crewe in A Little Princess and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden in beautifully illustrated editions. I read them until the words almost wore away. I was Sara coming from her attic to be discovered at last as the little girl everyone had been looking for. I was Mary exploring the deserted rooms of the manor house on the moors. In my early teens it was the poetry (all of Shakespeare) and the great Victorian novels. I told myself, “That is where I belong; that is where I must be.” England had formed in my mind as the place where I could find my true self.

  I painted a picture of “this earth, this realm, this England,” as Shakespeare calls it. It was a mixture of lovers running over the moors, a beautiful young queen, London attics, hot milky tea and servants always on hand to make it, and a great mysterious line of kings described as “the Unready” or “the Confessor” and queens who always looked ready to have their portraits painted and who each possessed a far more glamorous wardrobe than that within my schoolgirl closet; tombstones, ancient churches, an orderly way of being and doing things. (I was looking for the orderly; I passed by Henry VIII and his disorderly coterie of marriages. I am glad others felt differently! What would we do without Anne Boleyn?)

  And so I saved and saved and finally went to England, and the England I expected was waiting for me. I walked all over London. I visited the Tower on an overcast day when it was not crowded and was properly awed by the tiny rooms and thick walls. Still, the heart of my England was literature not royalty even though I love the stability and ceremony of a monarch, a world in which everyone had their place.

  I looked for writers—the new Globe had not been built, but I walked where Shakespeare had walked and found the old streets he had known: Cheapside, Love Lane. I visited Dickens’ House. I found and touched what was left of the London City Walls.

  I went to Haworth and walked in the parlor where Charlotte Bronte had walked with her sisters. I climbed about the moors and heard the wind wuthering. I went to Oxford where my great heroes had studied and heard the choirboys sing in the little cathedral as they had done for hundreds of years. I longed for medieval houses, for London fog, for wonderful names of villages. (I shall not forget my first bus ride to Yorkshire and passing the signs for the town of Giggleswick.)

  I was looking for something that I felt had been waiting for me. I believe it was.

  My husband came with me as I visited the places I love. When we stood in the old city, though, he saw the tall financial buildings and I saw the long-gone, half-timbered houses. Upon taking a tour bus, I became increasingly emotional at every sight, and when we finally passed Temple Bar where Fleet Street, City of London, becomes the Strand, Westminster, and where the City of London traditionally erected a barrier to regulate trade into the city (and traditionally the Lord Mayor of London must meet and allow entry to the monarch), I burst into a flood of tears. My husband was patient, comforting, and bewildered; he has often repeated this story to friends of how his wife could cry because someone walked a street in London three hundred years ago.

  All of us who write on this blog or read it are English or have longed for England so intensely that we have made it a major part of our creative and emotional lives. Its present and past are rooted in us in a way we cannot fully explain; it calls to each of us in a slightly different way. How has it called you and for what reasons?

  “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle…

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea…

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

  —Richard II (Shakespeare)

  Roman Britain and Early Medieval Period (55 B.C.—A.D. 1000)

  Boadicea: Warrior Queen of the Iceni Britons

  by Teresa Thomas Bohannon

  Boadicea was Queen of the Iceni, a tribe of the ancient Britons (in what is now Norfolk) during the era when Nero ruled in Rome and Roman troops occupied Britain. Her husband, Præsutagus, was King of the Iceni, and a Roman ally.

  Under Roman law the sovereignty of Præsutagus’ realm would end at his death and neither Boadicea nor their daughters would be allowed to rule in his stead; however, his personal wealth was his to distribute as he would. Præsutagus, a powerful ruler, had amassed a great deal of wealth during his reign. In an attempt to placate the occupying Romans and protect his family’s legacy, Præsutagus made the emperor of Rome co-heir to his personal wealth along with his two daughters.

  Unfortunately, Præsutagus underestimated the greed and brutality of the Romans. Immediately upon his death, they not only took possession of his lands, but also seized all of his personal assets.

  The widowed queen was outraged and protested vigorously. For her impertinence, she was seized by the Romans and publicly stripped and flogged. Her daughters were turned over to the Romans soldiers and subjected to indignity and rape. Other Iceni nobles could not help the widow and her daughters for their homes were also plundered and robbed, and those who were close relatives of the deceased king were reduced to either slavery or poverty when their loans were called in by the Romans.

  The Roman depredations had gone too far, and as such, they reaped terrible retribution.

  With Boadicea as their symbol and leader, the Icenis broke into open revolt. They were quickly joined in this insurrection by infuriated Britons from surrounding regions. Outraged by the heavy hand of Roman rule, conscription, onerous taxation and numerous other Roman cruelties, the Britons marched as one in the spirit of vengeance.

  Boadicea was the leader of the rebels, both in reality and spirit. Her wrongs had initially stirred them to revolt, and her bloodthirsty desire for vengeance led them to numerous victories. Before she was finished, the warrior queen’s army had burned the Roman colonies of Colchester, London, and Verulam, burning, torturing, and slaying more than 70,000 Romans and Roman sympathizers in the process.

  Her campaign of vengeance began at Camalodunum (Colchester), where there had lately settled a colony of Roman veterans who had treated the Britons cruelly, driving them from their houses, insulting them with the names of slaves and captives, and then standing idly by while the common soldiers further degraded and robbed the native landowners.

  Paulinus Suetonius, who then commanded the Roman forces in Britain, was absent on an expedition to further subjugate the Britons by crushing the Druid stronghold on the island of Mona. Of this expedition the historian Tacitus gives a vivid account.

  Suetonius’ boats approached the island to behold a terrifying sight. On the shore, Briton warriors prepared to receive them. Through their ranks rushed their women in funereal attire, their hair flying loose in the wind, flaming torches in their hands, and their whole appearance recalling the frantic rage of the fabled Furies. Nearby, ranged in order, stood the venerable Druids, or Celtic priests, with uplifted hands, at once invoking the gods and pouring forth imprecations upon the foe.

  The spectacle filled the Romans with awe and wonder. They stood in dumbfounded amazement, riveted to the spot—an easy mark for the foe had they been then attacked.


  The Romans, after their initial fright, were ashamed of standing in awe at a troop of women and a band of fanatic priests and rushed to the assault, cutting down all before them, tossing them into their own sacred fires, and burning the edifices and the sacred groves of the island.

  In addition to the actual peril presented by angry Britons, the Romans were frightened with dire omens. The statue of victory at Camalodunum fell without any visible cause and lay prostrate on the ground. Clamors in a foreign accent were heard in the Roman council chamber, the theaters were filled with the sound of savage howlings, the sea ran purple as with blood. The figures of human bodies were traced on the sands, and the image of a colony in ruins was reflected from the waters of the Thames.

  These omens threw the Romans into despair and filled the minds of the Britons with joy.

  No effort was made by the soldiers for defense, no ditch was dug, no palisade erected, and the assault of the Britons found the colonists utterly unprepared. Taken by surprise, the Romans were overpowered, and the colony was laid waste with fire and sword. The fortified temple alone held out, but after a two days’ siege it also was taken, and the Ninth Legion, which marched to its relief, was cut to pieces.

  Suetonius’ army was small and the number of the Britons was overwhelmingly greater. London at that time was a collection of miserable huts and entrenched cattle-pens, which were in Keltic speech called the “Fort-on-the-Lake” or “Llyndin,” an uncouth name in Latin ears, which the Romans called Londinium.

  In the final analysis, the interests of the empire trumped those of any city and Suetonius abandoned London to the Britons, despite the supplications of its imperiled citizens. He agreed to take under his protection those who chose to follow his banner. Many followed him, but many remained, and no sooner had he marched out than the Britons fell in rage on the settlement, and uninterested in either mercy, ransom, or prisoners, slaughtered all they found by gibbet, fire, or cross.

  Before they were through, Tacitus tells that more than 70,000 Romans, and Britons friendly to Rome, were massacred, and the Ninth Legion marching from Lincoln to the rescue had been nearly annihilated. FenMaric, one of the main characters in my historic fantasy novel, Shadows in a Timeless Myth, was a member of the Ninth Legion who fought and died attempting to stop Boadicea. He still exists to appear in Shadows because he was battle-cursed by a Druid Priest to the same fate that the Druid Priests believed themselves fated for, soul transmigration...but with a vengefully punishing twist!

  But despite the destruction that beset London and the Ninth Legion, in the end, the Romans had their own revenge. Suetonius marched through the land, and at length the two armies met. The skilled Roman general drew up his force (estimated to be 10,000 in number) in a place where a thick forest sheltered the rear and flanks, leaving only a narrow front open to attack.

  Here the Britons, twenty times his number (figures are quoted as upwards of 230,000) and confident of victory, approached. The warlike Boadicea, tall, stern of countenance, hair hanging to her waist, and spear in hand, drove along their front in her chariot, with her two daughters by her side, and eloquently sought to rouse her countrymen to thirst for revenge.

  Telling them of the base cruelty with which she and her daughters had been treated and painting in vivid words the arrogance and insults of the Romans, she besought them to fight for their country and their homes. “On this spot we must either conquer or die with glory,” she said. “There is no alternative. Though I am a woman, my resolution is fixed. The men, if they prefer, may survive with infamy and live in bondage. For me there is only victory or death.”

  Stirred to fury by her words, the British host rushed their enemies. But the weaponry and greater experience of the battle-hardened Romans proved far too much for native courage and ferocity.

  The Britons were repulsed, and the Romans, rushing forward in the strategically superior wedge, cut a fearful swathe of carnage through the disordered Briton ranks. The Roman cavalry followed and thousands fell. The wagons and families of the Britons which had been massed in the rear impeded the Briton retreat, and a dreadful slaughter in which neither sex nor age was spared ensued. Tacitus tells us that eighty thousand Britons fell, while the Roman slain numbered no more than four hundred men.

  Boadicea, who had done her utmost to rally her flying hosts, kept to her resolution. When all was lost, according to Tacitus, she, like Cleopatra before her, chose poison over capture by the Romans and perished upon the field where she had vowed to seek victory or death. With her decease the success of the Britons vanished, and to ensure Roman dominance, the insurrectionists were hunted down and killed. Suetonius was recalled to Rome, his ferocity deprecated, and himself judged wanting for his failure to control his subordinates, thus laying the groundwork for Boadicea’s rebellion.

  As for Britain, she buried the memories of her rebellious warrior queen for many centuries and became a quiet and peaceful part of the Roman Empire.

  While about the shore of Mona those Neronian legionaries

  Burnt and broke the grove and altar of the Druid and Druidess,

  Far in the East Boadicea, standing loftily charioted,

  Mad and maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility,

  Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Camulodune,

  Yell’d and shriek’d between her daughters o’er a wild confederacy.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Ancient Roman London as Destroyed by Boadicea, Britain’s Warrior Queen

  by Teresa Thomas Bohannon

  A learned antiquary, Thomas Lewin, Esq., has proved, as nearly as such things can be proved, that Julius Cæsar and 8,000 men, who had sailed from Boulogne, landed near Romney Marsh about half-past five o’clock on Sunday the 27th of August, 55 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

  Centuries before that very remarkable August day on which the brave standard-bearer of Cæsar’s Tenth Legion sprang from his gilt galley into the sea and, eagle in hand, advanced against the javelins of the painted Britons who lined the shore, there is now no doubt London was already existing as a British town of some importance, known to the fishermen and merchants of the Gauls and Belgians.

  Strabo, a Greek geographer who flourished in the reign of Augustus, speaks of British merchants as bringing to the Seine and the Rhine shiploads of corn, cattle, iron, hides, slaves, and dogs, and taking back brass, ivory, amber ornaments, and vessels of glass. By these merchants, the desirability of such a depot as London with its great and always navigable river could not have been long overlooked.

  In Cæsar’s second and longer invasion in the next year (54 B.C.), when his 28 many-oared triremes and 560 transports, in all 800, poured on the same Kentish coast 21,000 legionaries and 2,000 cavalry, there is little doubt that his strong foot left its imprint near that cluster of stockaded huts (more resembling a New Zealand pah than a modern English town) perhaps already called London—Llyn-don, the “town on the lake.”

  After a battle at Challock Wood, Cæsar and his men crossed the Thames, as is supposed, at Coway Stakes, an ancient ford a little above Walton and below Weybridge.

  Cassivellaunus, King of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, had just slain in war Immanuent, King of Essex, and had driven out his son Mandubert. The Trinobantes, Mandubert’s subjects, joined the Roman spearmen against the 4,000 scythed chariots of Cassivellaunus and the Catyeuchlani.

  Straight as the flight of an arrow was Cæsar’s march upon the capital of Cassivellaunus, a city the barbaric name of which he either forgot or disregarded, but which he merely says was “protected by woods and marshes.”

  This place north of the Thames has usually been thought to be Verulamium (St. Alban’s); but it was far more likely London, as the Cassi, whose capital Verulamium was, were among the traitorous tribes who joined Cæsar against their oppressor Cassivellaunus. Moreover, Cæsar’s brief descri
ption of the spot perfectly applies to Roman London, for ages protected on the north by a vast forest, full of deer and wild boars, and which, even as late as the reign of Henry II, covered a great region, and has now shrunk into the not very wild districts of St. John’s Wood and Caen Wood.

  On the north the town found a natural moat in the broad fens of Moorfields, Finsbury, and Houndsditch, while on the south ran the Fleet and the Old Bourne. Indeed, according to Stukeley, Cæsar, marching from Staines to London, encamped on the site of Old St. Pancras Church, round which edifice Stukeley found evident traces of a great Prætorian camp.

  However, whether Cassivellaunus, the King of Middlesex and Hertfordshire, had his capital at London or St. Alban’s, this much at least is certain, that the legionaries carried their eagles swiftly over his stockades of earth and fallen trees, drove off the blue-stained warriors, and swept off the half-wild cattle kept by the Britons.

  Shortly after, Cæsar returned to Gaul, having heard while in Britain of the death of his favourite daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, his great rival. His camp at Richborough or Sandwich was far distant, the dreaded equinoctial gales were at hand, and Gaul, he knew, might at any moment of his absence start into a flame. His inglorious campaign had lasted just four and a half months—his first had been far shorter.

  As Cæsar himself wrote to Cicero, our rude island was defended by stupendous rocks, there was not a scrap of the gold that had been reported, and the only prospect of booty was in slaves, from whom there could be expected neither “skill in letters nor in music.”

  In sober truth, all Cæsar had won from the people of Kent and Hertfordshire had been blows and buffets, for there were men in Britain even then. The prowess of the British charioteers became a standing joke in Rome against the soldiers of Cæsar. Horace and Tibullus both speak of the Briton as unconquered. The steel bow the strong Roman hand had for a moment bent, quickly relapsed to its old shape the moment Cæsar, mounting his tall galley, turned his eyes towards Gaul.