Jemahl Evans, author of the Blandford Candy series of novels about a man known as the last Roundhead, surveys 300 years of fiction about the English Civil Wars.
The popularity of the English Civil Wars and the wider 17th century as a period for historical fiction novelists has ebbed and flowed over the last 300 years. Fortunately for me, after some time in the doldrums, it is becoming more popular with readers in a genre dominated by the Tudors and the 20th century.
From Daniel Defoe’s very first foray into civil war fiction 300 years ago to the present day interpretations in books and film, Civil War fiction has often been as much a reflection of the authors’ own time as much as of 1642–1660.
Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier was first published in 1720, 80 years or so after the events depicted in the story. Defoe’s book (certainly not his best), caught the zeitgeist of the age. The English Civil Wars were very much in vogue during the first decades of the 18th century.
Memoirs and histories galore abounded as the period slipped out of living memory and people recorded their grandfathers’ tales of Roundhead and Cavalier.
Defoe’s book is purported to be a genuine account of a young officer’s career, a trope that has flourished to the present day with novelists (Ronald Welch, Michael Arnold, MJ Logue, the new novel set in the Thirty Years’ War by Griff Hosker, and of course my own books), but the novel’s literary influence went much wider than defining civil war fiction.
Winston S Churchill based his writing style on Defoe’s Memoirs of A Cavalier for his The World Crisis and The Second World War. Defending the choice to hang his histories on the personal often anecdotal evidence of his own career, Churchill pointed out his unique experiences during the period that informed the decision to ape Defoe.1
A century after Defoe and it was Captain Frederick Marryat’s opus The Children of the New Forest (1847) that defined the period for generations of readers. Marryat’s novel was written at the height of the Chartist movement in Britain, and with more than a whiff of revolution in the air across Europe, and it undeniably reflects Marryat’s own conservative outlook towards those contemporary upheavals.
The story follows the children of a Royalist officer killed at Naseby who suffer trials and tribulations during the Republic and Commonwealth, with obvious themes of reconciliation with the restoration of the monarchy. As one of the very first books aimed at younger readers, its popularity and longevity ensured that Marryat’s perspective of romantic dashing Cavaliers and dour depressing Roundheads became fixed in the popular imagination.2
So influential was Marryat’s interpretation that Sellar and Yeatman repeated it in 1066 and All That, itself an important work in defining British history in the eyes of the reading public: “… in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).”3
Marryat’s influence on historical fiction meant that the Civil Wars were often a popular topic for children’s literature. Ronald Welch and the Carey Saga (a series of 13 novels that followed the fortunes of a single family through British and European history from the Second Crusade (1187) up to the trenches of the Western Front in 1917) would visit the period in the fifth book, For The King.
Welch’s Civil War instalment follows Neil Carey, a royalist officer, as his career progresses through the wars. Written in the 1960s, it conforms to Defoe’s stereotype of a young officer, but Welch’s treatment of the two sides is much more even handed than Marryat’s, perhaps reflecting changing attitudes towards the conflict in the post war period.
At the same time as Christopher Hill was revolutionising historical research into the Civil War in the 50s and 60s, more and more books showing different aspects and viewpoints appeared on publishers’ lists. Simon (1953) by the wonderful Rosemary Sutcliff showed the conflict from a very local, parliamentarian, view-point and was ridiculously successful. Marcus Crouch, the esteemed reviewer of children’s novels stated: “…in Simon (1953), the author found her strength in a brilliant realistic picture of life in the civil wars.”4
The 60s and 70s seem to have been the very high point in the popularity of English Civil War fiction, and interest in the period in general. In 1968 the Sealed Knot re-enactment society was founded by the historian Peter Young.
In 1970, the Oscar-winning film Cromwell was a massive success in the British box office (despite inaccuracies in the script by the brilliant George Macdonald Fraser). The BBC adapted The Children of The New Forest for a third time in 1977, and followed that with the remarkably successful By The Sword Divided (1983-85).
My own first encounter with the period was a Geoffrey Trease short story When the Drums Beat, which had a fabulous image of Roundhead soldiers on the front cover that drew in my six year old self.
The rest of the 80s, and the 90s and noughties, were pretty barren when it came to successful English Civil War fiction in film or print. At the same time, the National Curriculum was introduced (1988) and the period declined dramatically in popularity at A level in favour of more ‘modern’ periods of study.
This left the English Civil Wars languishing as a topic only studied by most people for six weeks when they are about 12 years old – it has had an effect on people’s fiction choices.
When I started writing my first book, I was told in no uncertain terms that the period was “too complicated for readers”. Fortunately I persevered, and the Civil Wars seem to be enjoying a renaissance in popularity in the last decade. In film with the outstanding, disturbing, and surreal A Field in England (2013), and in print with writers like Michael Arnold, Griff Hosker, Eleanor Swift-Hook, MJ Logue, Miranda Malins, Rob Lloyd, Mark Turnbull and many more (sorry if I missed you) all setting successful novels in the middle of the 17th century.
If you are at all interested in the development of English Civil War fiction over the last 300 years, I can highly recommend Professor Farah Mendlesohn’s study: Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars, which I have shamelessly pilfered for this article (much like I shamelessly pilfered from Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier for my novels).
The Last Roundhead, the first in the Sir Blandford Candy series by Jemahl Evans, is currently on offer in ebook format at 99p.
jemahlevans.wixsite.com/jemahlevans
Here are some other features Jemahl has written:
Stealing the secret of silk: the first international industrial spies?
Reinventing Thomas Becket
Merkins and masochists: a brief history of sex
Mr Beeston and the Cockpit
He’s also reviewed A Night of Flames and Storm of Steel by Matthew Harffy
And we did a Historia Q&A with Jemahl
Notes:
1 Churchill, Winston, The Gathering Storm, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company
2 Robert H MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918, Manchester University Press
3 Sellar WC, and Yeatman RJ, 1066 And All That, Methuen Publishing Ltd
4 Marcus Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers: Children’s books in Britain 1900-1960, The Library Association
Miranda Malins and Mark Turnbull have written features for Historia linked to their books. Fiona Forsyth interviewed Eleanor Swift-Hook for us, and Eleanor has retold the often-forgotten story of the Dunkirker privateers. Griff Hosker considers his career as an author, and Rob Lloyd’s Bedlam, Robert Hooke and Henry Hunt looks at the background to his latest novel.
More features connected to the English Civil Wars and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms:
The fight for our battlefields by Tim Lynch
Oliver Cromwell’s war on Christmas? by Stuart Orme
Charles I – the boy who would be King by Mark Turnbull
Killing a king: the execution of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: queen, warrior, politician, woman by Leanda de Lisle
Henrietta Maria, a forgotten queen? by Frances Quinn
Historia interviews: Giles Kristian by Matthew Harffy
Historia interviews: Antonia Senior by Elizabeth Fremantle
Good Boye or devil dog? Prince Rupert’s poodle and Historia interviews: Minette Walters by Frances Owen
Images:
- Last Stand of Newcastle’s White Coats, recreation of the Battle of Marston Moor, 1644, by Mark Abel: Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, 1st edition, 1720: Via Libri
- Cover of The Children of the New Forest by Frederick Marryat, 1911: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Cromwell poster: Wikimedia (fair use)
- By The Sword Divided: Wikimedia (fair use)
