Sansom and Scarrow

In terms of novels, I am all for thrillers and murder mysteries. Two very good ones that I’ve read recently happen to be set in Tudor times – although, as is usually the case with historical novels, there are quite a few nods to the present day.

First up is Sword & Scimitar by Simon Scarrow, a standalone novel about the 1565 Great Siege of Malta – when the island fortress of the Knights of St John was besieged by the Ottoman Turks. At stake was the future not just of Malta – then as in the Second World War, a key strategic position in the Mediterranean – but of Christian Europe. Quite frankly, this is a key event in European history that should be more widely known about than it is.

Even so, there is of course more to Sword & Scimitar than the defence of what would become The West. The novel’s protagonist, an English knight called Sir Thomas Barrett, is a disgraced former member of the Order of St John who is summoned from rural Hertfordshire to return to help defend Malta. In addition to risking life and limb for a cause he has tried to forget about, he is given a secret mission to carry out on Malta by Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster-in-chief to Queen Elizabeth I. There’s a certain document in the Order’s archive on Malta that needs to be recovered at all costs, and to help with this task Sir Thomas is given an assistant who has a few secrets of his own.

In a sense, then, this is a spy novel that happens to be set against the backdrop of one of the most significant battles of the sixteenth century. There are dire consequences for England if the document falls into the wrong hands (far be it from me to spoil things by saying what the document is, as Sir Thomas is as much in the dark as the reader for the best part of the novel), although for much of the novel this is of secondary importance to the battle for control of the island – and should the Turks win, the consequences for all of Europe would in themselves be catastrophic.

Thanks to his ‘Eagle’ series of Roman-era novels, Simon Scarrow has a proven track record when it comes to describing historical fight scenes and he’s clearly in his element as the Knights’ situation becomes ever more dire in the face of unrelenting attacks by the numerically superior Turks.

This being a modern novel, blind faith is treated with some degree of scepticism by the main protagonist who, having seen at first hand the destructive power of religion – both in terms of the all-out war between Christianity and Islam and the persecution of Catholics in England – has lost his faith, something which enables the modern reader to identify with him.

Secrets concerning the stability of Tudor-era England are key to another recently-read novel, Sovereign by C.J. Sansom.

Unlike Sword & Scimitar, Sovereign is part of a series of novels – to be precise, the third in the Shardlake series of detective novels set during the latter part of Henry VIII’s reign. The protagonist, Matthew Shardlake, is a hunchbacked London-based lawyer who, rather like Sir Thomas, has come to privately doubt his faith and this, combined with having to endure endless mockery for his physical stature,  causes him to regard the sixteenth-century world he inhabits from a cynical viewpoint – thus allowing us readers to identify with him as an outsider.

Sovereign sees Shardlake and his assistant, Jack Barak (the brawn to Shardlake’s brain), in York. Henry VIII’s 1541 progress to the North – a region still seething with discontent following the Pilgrimage of Grace – is about to arrive in the city but Shardlake is actually on a secret mission to ensure that a key anti-Henry prisoner in York Castle gets taken to the Tower of London for questioning (obtaining information by torture being nothing new under the sun). Things start to become rather complicated when a local glazier is found dead, and Shardlake stumbles across a cache of documents that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Tudor claim to the throne (I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it’s based on an historical rumour that’s been given TV airtime before now).

It’s always interesting to see how famous people from history are represented in the pages of historical novels. In Sword & Scimitar, Walsingham is shown as a sixteenth-century version of M, a role that Archbishop Cranmer appears to fulfil in Sovereign (in the first two novels of the Shardlake series, Dissolution and Dark Fire, this role was played by Thomas Cromwell, himself the subject of a recent Tudor-era novel, Wolf Hall). But where Sovereign takes things to a new level is with the appearance in its pages of the larger-than-life man whose personality and actions dominated the Tudor era.

I refer, of course, to Henry VIII. Even as an unseen character in the first two Shardlake novels, he cast a long shadow and left the reader with the impression that getting close to his royal personage was inherently dangerous (Dark Fire, of course, ended with the execution of Thomas Cromwell). I’d previously though that Samson was doing well to resist drawing him into the story, but for his third novel he takes the plunge, and brings out the big man – but only for a walk-on part at the gates of York, with the stench from his infected leg (if nothing else, the Shardlake books convey the smell of Tudor England to an unsurpassable extent) hitting the nose before he deigns to ridicule the man who is in fact working to save his realm.

Accompanying him is wife number five, the doomed teenager Katherine Howard (not so much young enough to be Henry’s daughter as actually several years younger than his eldest) who gets an unusually sympathetic portrayal here, and the impression we are given via Shardlake of her fall from grace is that she was a naive girl who was more sinned against than sinning (this is made more explicit in the afterword – all good works of historical fiction have one of these – where Sansom does his best to clear her name of the charge of adultery that is usually thrown at her). Sovereign is a well-written and well-researched novel (Sansom holds a PhD in History), but his obvious erudition never stifles the plot – as, for example, the author’s learning does in The Name of the Rose and to a lesser extent Wolf Hall.

Sovereign and Sword & Scimitar are both worth reading. They have timeless themes running through them that are as valid today as they were in the sixteenth century: The uses and abuses of power, clashes between civilisations and religious conflict all feature. They also pose some very modern questions. Can the state be trusted? How far do you go to defend what you believe in? Is information obtained by torture valid? Does the end really justify the means? And finally, if you have information that will probably plunge your country into chaos if it’s released, what do you do with it?

Bernard Cornwell and Simon Scarrow

For around twenty years, I have listed Bernard Cornwell as one of my favourite authors. The other month I finished reading Death of Kings, the latest instalment in his ‘Saxon’ series which is worth a read if you like novels that you can come away from with the feeling that you’ve actually learned something interesting as a result of having read them.

Bernard Cornwell’s novels usually centre around an honest man of action who has little time for political scheming, and in this series the hero/narrator is Uhtred, a Saxon who was brought up as a Viking but who fights (somewhat reluctantly) for Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and the one man standing between the Vikings and their goal of dominating all of Britain. This has formed the basis of the series so far, but in this sixth novel the focus changes as Alfred is dying, various would-be successors are getting ready to make their bids for power and the fragile truce between Wessex and the Vikings is about to fall apart.

Alfred the Great has somewhat fallen out of favour with whoever decides what should be part of the history curriculum in schools (in which there’s a big gap between the Romans and 1066), even though his story is integral to the formation of what would come to be England. But Cornwell’s Alfred is no warrior king. His take on Alfred as a sickly scholar who is very much the ‘brains behind the operation’ is an good one, and having the narrator as a pagan – in contrast to the pious Alfred – allows the author to explore more fully the struggle between Christianity and paganism that he started on in the Warlord trilogy – a reinterpretation of the Arthurian legends which I still think is Cornwell’s best work. I think there’s a touch of the pagan in Cornwell, as the Christians of his stories are portrayed in a rather negative light. Although it clearly inspires some of the characters to do great things, organised religion is portrayed here as a force for intolerance, pomposity and repression (over the course of Death of Kings, Uhtred manages to infuriate and poke fun at several clergymen to good comic effect). In a sense, therefore, there’s something very modern about these books even though they’re set in the Dark Ages.

One of Cornwell’s more shorter works is the blurb that features on the cover of every edition of every Simon Scarrow novel, in which he is quoted as saying ‘I really don’t need this kind of competition’. Simon Scarrow has been around for over a decade now, during the course of which he has produced the ‘Eagle’ series of novels about Macro and Cato, a pair of Roman soldiers who, although initially mismatched (bluff veteran and younger, more thoughtful man who is mentored in the ways of soldiering by said veteran) become firm and trusted friends. Their adventures have taken them to various parts of the Roman Empire of the mid-first century AD and supporting characters have included Vespasian, Boadicea, St Peter (I kid you not) and Narcissus, the imperial secretary to the Emperor Claudius who serves as a scheming proto-spymaster who gets our heroes to do his dirty work despite the fact that they’d much rather be doing some good, honest soldiering (shades of Bernard Cornwell here).

No novel set in the past can truly escape the time at which it is written, and this applies to novels about the Romans as much as it does to those about the Saxons. In the former, an all-conquering empire has invaded places like Britannia and Judea but is struggling to govern these unruly provinces, with the locals engaging in guerrilla-type resistance that the highly-disciplined Roman army is unable to deal with as effectively as it can deal with its enemies in a proper battle. As such, some people are coming to the conclusion that it would be better to withdraw from such places. The plot of one of the earlier books, When the Eagle Hunts, centres around the kidnapping of a general’s family by a group of religious fanatics (Druids in this case, but the modern parallel is obvious).

The eleventh and latest in this series, Praetorian, takes us to the heart of Rome itself as our heroes go undercover as ordinary soldiers to join the Praetorian Guard in order to root out a conspiracy against the Emperor. As a result, this is a little different from the other books as Macro and Cato become immersed in espionage and politics. There’s less fighting than usual and more sneaking around and talking in whispers, and when there is fighting it’s in the form of street brawls rather than pitched battles. There are a few points where one gets the impression of this being a thriller that just happens to be set in Ancient Rome – the novel begins with a well-planned heist, and at one stage a couple of characters need to be taken out of the city quickly and someone says he’s got a horse-and-cart in a lock-up down the road that can be used. There are also a few light-hearted moments, such as when Narcissus wonders why there isn’t a (Latin) word for that feeling of superiority you get when you hear of someone else’s misfortune.

The Emperor at the heart of the action is Claudius. Rather like Alfred the Great, we have become accustomed to a certain idea of what he was like as a person. Thanks largely to Robert Graves (author of I Claudius) and Derek Jacobi (who played Claudius in the TV adaptation of Graves’s novel), we think of him as a man who, thanks to a stutter and a pronounced limp, is written off by everyone as a fool, but beneath the bumbling exterior he is in fact very intelligent and he eventually becomes a surprisingly effective emperor. There’s some of that in Scarrow’s interpretation, although his Claudius is more reflective of the Claudius of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars – over-reliant on advisers, manipulated by those around him and something of a dirty old man. Waiting to take over is his adopted son, Nero, shown here as a thoughtful youngster rather than the murderous tyrant he would become.

Macro and Cato will return, we are assured, and when they do they’ll be back with the legions in Britannia so it looks as though Scarrow wants to return to the successful formula of his earlier books. In the meantime, his latest novel, due out in paperback later this year, is about an English knight at the siege of Malta. I can’t wait.