Historians

Had I chosen to research the English Civil War there are loads of authors to consult, from the high-powered philosophic analyses of the greatest of English historians to the graphic book accounts of battles designed for young people. You might think that everything that could be said about that war has now been discovered and written up. It has also been well covered by novelists. However, however brilliant the historian there is a tendency to take an eye off the detail when it comes to referring to the Scottish dimension. One example I found was on reading Diane Purkiss's otherwise absolutely brilliant book, The English Civil War: A People's History. It's a vast and absorbing read and covers so much, from how Charles I's childhood probably affected his attitude to kingship, to accounts of the leading Parliamentarians of Cromwell's regime, the early socialist ideologies of the Diggers and Levellers, the horrors of battle wounds, the trials of musketry, the pillaging, massacring, devastation of people's homes and the countryside, the activities of spies and witchfinders - an absolute mine of information for anyone contemplating writing a fiction based in that period. However, towards the end she makes two brief comments that made me cross. One was that the Marquis of Hamilton 'delayed' his invasion of England in support of Charles I in 1648, and the other was that Charles II 'invaded' Scotland in 1650. The first point is much more complex than her statement would suggest and I won't go into it here. However, the second statement is plain wrong. Charles II came to Scotland at the invitation of its Covenanting government, who promised him support to regain his lost throne, subject to his satisfying their religious demands and abjuring the 'sins' of his forebears. He came in one ship, a frigate lent to him by his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, and had a small retinue of friends and courtiers, most of whom he was almost immediately required to disband at the orders of the Scots when he arrived. It's just a detail, but it's kind of telling. It suggests that whatever happened in Scotland is not important enough to be precise enough about. Or that's my impression.

Combing the library shelves, however, took me to David Stevenson, Emeritus Professor of History at St. Andrews University. I started with a book of his called King or Covenant? Voices from Civil War. It contains profiles of 13 individuals who lived through this turbulent period in Scotland and who left records of their experiences in the form of letters, journals or just brief chronicles of events. This opened up a series of portraits of people who are perhaps less well known now unless you know the period well. It includes soldiers of fortune, lawyers, politicians, ministers of the kirk, a Catholic priest and one woman, Anne, Lady Halkett, whose main claim to fame is that she helped the young James, Duke of York, escape Cromwell's clutches by disguising him as a girl. Through Stevenson's biliographical references I could now follow up these individuals and broaden my impressions of the period through their preoccupations.

Later I got hold of Stevenson's Revolution and Counter Revolution 1644-51, an invaluable account of what was happening in Scotland during those years, the second of a two volume account of the history of the Covenant. I found it so useful I was constantly renewing it at the library, but it is otherwise out of print and therefore difficult to get hold of a personal copy.

But my main point here is that even secondary historical material on this period of Scottish history is not easy to come by. At the recent Edinburgh Book Festival I attended a session about Scottish history and one of the participants, the author of a new book called The Killing Time, said that he had written it because he could not find the kind of book he wanted on the subject.

Starting to research

When I started to think about this project my knowledge of 17th century Scotland was sketchy at best, and my knowledge of the mid-century in particular could have gone on the back of a postage stamp - in BIG letters. I had to find out everything - the political context, the significant events, the movers and shakers, then the social context, how people lived, what they wore, how they might have thought. I had no contacts with expertise in the field, and even if I did locate one, was diffident about approaching him or her with this vague idea of a fiction for goodness sake. I imagined a rather patronising putdown. 'Oh, I suppose you're trying to emulate Hilary Mantel? Such a vogue for historical novels at the moment. Never read them myself. Now what exactly do you want to know?'

That was it. I didn't know what I needed to know until I knew more. For someone my age using the internet seemed such a lazy way to find out stuff. Far too easy. Think of a person. Click. Up comes Wikipedia. Think of a place. Click. Up comes some tourist information, lists of hotels and b+bs, activities for all the family and some pretty pictures. Bits of history might come up as well. Later I was to discover some more useful and relevant information from the net, but initially I was wary. All those pages framed with distracting advertisements. How accurate was the information? How authoritative could it possibly be?

So I went to books. Biographies first. These were the easiest to get hold of and the most accessible to read. Charles II was a key figure. Antonia Fraser and Jenny Uglow had impressive biographies, with extensive bibliographies. Bibliographies would become important. However, I started with the books themselves. Jenny Uglow's focuses on the Restoration and after. A bit later than I wanted, but it showed what Charles II became and that was important. Antonia Fraser deals with his life as a whole. And that showed how he grew up, was educated and how his life was disrupted by the turbulence of the English Civil War. However, I wanted information on his abortive visit to Scotland in 1650-51. Antonia Fraser's biography gave me a start, but there wasn't as much as I wanted. A bibliographical reference, however, sent me to an older biography by Hester Chapman called The Tragedy of Charles II, and she had more on his sad year in Scotland. It was important because the way he was treated by the Scots government and the kirk during that year soured his feelings about the Scots, and after he left on the ill-fated campaign that ended at Worcester he never returned to Scotland again. Being a Scot, that bothered me.

I moved on to other biographies covering his family. Much was made of his dark skin. On his mother's side his grandmother, Marie de Medicis, was Italian. His grandfather was Henri IV, who thought Paris was worth a Mass and was assassinated in 1610. His mother grew up at the French court. She took refuge there when she had to flee England and he joined her there. How had that affected him? Her fervent Catholicism? The absolutism of the French court? How about his relationships with his brothers and sisters? Then he took refuge in Holland, always in vain seeking support for the Stuart restoration. The eldest of his sisters was married to the Prince of Orange. So I began delving into Dutch history and their long wars with Spain. It was to negotiate with him in Holland that the seven commissioners of the Scottish government came after his father's execution in 1649 to discuss the terms on which the Scots might assist him to regain his throne. Antonia Fraser's biography made reference to the diary of a certain Alexander Jaffray, a minister from Aberdeen, who was one of those commissioners. Now this was a primary text, which I was able to dowload and read online. He had regretted the way in which he and his fellow commissioners had refused to compromise their demands on the prince, then only 19 years old, but at the time he had been one of the most intransigent. Jaffray later, curiously, became a Quaker - that form of religion coming to Scotland among the independents in Cromwell's army, such anathema to the Scots kirk.

I was no nearer composing a fiction. Was Charles II to figure in it as a character, or merely as someone observed? However, I was beginning to get a handle on a great deal of background information. A stack of reporters' notebooks was filling up.