In "Time Patrol":
Victorian England;
post-Roman Britain;
the blitz.
In The Corridors Of Time:
the reign of Henry VIII;
the Bronze Age.
In A Midsummer Tempest:
the Civil War.
In The King Of Ys (with Karen Anderson):
Hadrian's Wall.
In Mother Of Kings:
the 10th century.
In The Broken Sword:
the Danelaw.
In The Last Viking:
1066 and all that.
And, in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Doll's House, a wealthy family has had the same solicitors since the '45 Rebellion.
In real life, an English family knew that one of its ancestors had been a witness to the execution of Charles I.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm reminded of how the restored Charles II once visited Oliver Cromwell's son Henry. And was reassuringly soothing and forgiving, despite the rather notorious bad history their fathers had with each other!
Sean
Charles II was a very intelligent man, with an ironic sense of humor and able to view things (including himself) with a sense of detachment, and by nature not at all bloody-minded; not coincidentally, he was that rare Stuart -- he died of natural causes, secure on his throne, and not even scrambling for money.
Mr Stirling,
Charles I was executed. Charles II was exiled although restored. An inauspicious name? What will become of Charles III? You have given us one version of that.
As I understand it, Charles II's reign had two purposes: to keep his crown on his head and his head on his shoulders.
Paul.
Whenever James, his brother and heir, advised Charles II to do something arbitrary, he would reply: "James, James, I have no wish to go upon my travels again."
And when James cautioned him against taking his daily walk in the same place all the time, he replied: "James, James, there is no man in England who will kill -me- to make -you- king."
I also like his comment on Governor Berkeley's suppression of Bacon's Revolt in Virginia: "That old fool has killed more men in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father!"
Charles was a -good- politician, if sometimes a bit lazy. Eg., he was almost certainly Catholic by conviction throughout his adult life, but he kept it secret and remained a communicant of the Anglican Church until he was on his deathbed, whereupon he called in a Catholic priest and made confession.
James was -openly- Catholic and openly tried to reconvert England to Catholicism -- probably the only policy which could have gotten him overthrown.
When Charles died, he handed James a loyal packed parliament, a sufficient revenue if he avoided expensive wars, a growing economy, a standing army ready to support the Throne, all the most prominent Whigs in exile, and an Anglican Church preaching "passive obedience" to all Royal commands.
The political class -- the landowners -- were mostly Anglican and staunchly anti-Whig, since they remembered Cromwell and the major-generals and the social turmoil of the Commonwealth period all too well. And England as a whole was anti-Dutch, including the urban Dissenters, since the Netherlands were the biggest commercial and colonial rivals of the rising merchant cities.
Then James managed to throw it all away in a scant few years and "go on his travels again", with nearly everyone welcoming a Dutch king!
Entirely his own fault -- Charles must have told him to avoid attacking the religious settlement above all other things. He just wasn't willing to believe the obvious truth -- obvious to his brother -- that all the significant people in England were deeply attached to the Protestant cause.
History is a moving target, too.
Eg., ancient DNA samples have just in the last two years totally upended our conception of what happened in Britain during the early Bronze Age.
It turns out that the "Beaker Culture", at least the northern variety of it, was brought to Britain by a mass migration (something very much out of fashion in archaeological circles for the last fifty years), and one so massive that it resulted in a complete population turnover -- a 90% replacement of the previous genome with a new one deriving from the lower Rhine delta country.
The previous Neolithic population had ultimately been derived from the Anatolian migrants who brought agriculture to Europe, slightly mixed with the indigenous hunter-gatherers; they were apparently totally swept away by the Bell-Beaker immigrants.
We can also tell, now, that the two populations looked rather different, since genetic analysis has been refined to the point where markers for physical appearance can be detected.
This is all much more like early-20th century conceptions of historical change, and the scholars are having severe heartburn over it.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with your assessment of Charles II and James II. And that Charles II was far more politically astute and realistic than his brother. The only real quibble I would make is that I don't think Charles was lazy. The impression I got from books like Antonia Fraser's ROYAL CHARLES is that he was able to get others to do what needed to be done without looking excessively "active" about it. Rather like John Rolfe VI in your book CONQUISTADOR.
As for poor James II, I have to agree that when it came to politics, he was a bungler. But I think it's only right to say he was not a bad man, possessing in fact many very real abilities and virtues. If James II had been content to govern as his brother had done then he would have died peacefully on the throne and been succeed by his son.
I would like to point out how France had two kings uncannily like these Stuart monarchs: Louis XVIII and Charles X. After the first downfall of Napoleon in 1814, the monarchy was restored under Louis XVIII. That king, like Charles II, was basically a forgiving and conciliatory man, willing to make concessions and adapt to changed times (as his constitutional Charter of 1814 indicates). Unfortunately, Louis XVIII had no son who would have continued his policies, being succeeded by his brother Charles X. Altho by no means either a bad or stupid man, that king proved unsuccessful at politics and fatally misjudged how far he could go. If he had followed his brother's policies then I think Charles X would have remained kill till he died and been succeeded by his son.
Sean
Sean: I basically agree. Though Charles X did do some remarkably stupid things -- thinking that conquering Algeria would swing the country behind him, for example. And in 1830 he not only tried to suppress political demonstrations in Paris, but utterly bungled the practicalities of doing it. If you read an account of the street fighting, it's real Keystone Kops stuff.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with what you said about Charles X. It fits in with what I read in Philip Mansel's comments about Charles X in his biography of Louis XVIII. Mansel was careful to add that the Comte d'Artois (as he was before he became Charles X) had his "liberal" moments. Which I interpreted as meaning times when he had flashes of good sense.
Sean
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