Fiona Forsyth speaks to fellow author Eleanor Swift-Hook for Historia: After reading The Devil’s Command by chance, I found myself hooked (sorry, Eleanor!) and I have just finished The Physician’s Fate, the latest in the Lord’s Legacy series. I asked its author, Eleanor Swift-Hook, about the series.
FF: The mess that is the English Civil War is not frequently chosen for the setting of a series of mysteries, but you clearly love the period and are extremely knowledgeable about it. How did your interest in this period begin?
ESH: I fell in love with the period at university — on my first day there as well. I was attending the usual Freshers’ Fair event. All the different clubs and societies run by and for the students were out recruiting. Sports clubs, political ones and any number of special interest and hobby societies. The Student’s Union building was overflowing with them.
Then I saw a group of people who were dressed up as the Three Musketeers! At least that is how it looked to me then. I made a beeline for them, after all what could be more fun than that?
It turned out they were members of the English Civil War Society, who bring that period to life both at large scale mock-battles and smaller scale historically accurate re-enactments. Over the next few years, I took part in both and that cemented my love of the era.
FF: From the first, I found Philip Lord an outstanding character, intelligent and capable of inspiring loyalty in so many different people, but also distant. We see Philip mainly through the eyes of our hero, Gideon, who distrusts Lord and is indeed politically opposed to him.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the series is how Lord gradually inspires respect in Gideon: however, I have no idea whether this will convince Gideon to change his deep loyalty to Parliament. Is Philip Lord based on any historical figure(s) or did he spring fully formed from your imagination?
ESH: Historically there is no one figure I could point to as his inspiration. Philip Lord certainly was based on a type of individual who did exist at that time, men who were the military entrepreneurs of the Thirty Years’ War.
Some of them became very famous and led large armies, men like Ernst von Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, Louis de Geer, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar — and the most famous and successful of them all, Albrecht von Wallenstein.
But there were many lesser men who got involved in the business of war in these most turbulent years of the 17th century. Men who recruited and equipped military units at their own expense and either leased them out to another commander or led them to fight for pay and plunder. One could invest in war as in any other business at the time. Fortunes (and lives) were made and lost by those who did so.
But all that said, my main inspiration for Philip Lord as a character is literary rather than historical. I am a dyed in the wool fan of Dorothy Dunnett and the true inspiration for Philip Lord can be found in her works.
FF: The structure – and fluidity — of the relationships in the series is unusual and I found it very appealing. I have talked about Philip Lord: not exactly the hero of the series but very much a heroic figure. Tied to him in two quite different ways are the lawyer Gideon Fox and the aristocrat Nick Tempest. Gideon, the more sympathetic, is unwillingly a member of Lord’s company, Nick is a spoiled and shallow young man, committed to hunting Lord down.
At the start of the series, they are both to be overcome by Lord’s charm! Running like vividly coloured threads through the books are other memorable characters like Mags (I have no idea whose side he is on, he is so twisty!) and the beautiful and talented Zahara. As one who has lived in an Islamic country, I was especially interested in Zahara and would like to ask: what do we know about the lives of Muslims in 17th-century England?
ESH: In brief, very little. There was no Islamic community in England at this time.
I researched this aspect before allowing Zahara and Shiraz a place in the cast as I wanted to be sure I wasn’t inadvertently practising presentism. There were Muslims, slave and free, to be found across Western Europe at this time, but few in the north.
Although some Muslims undoubtedly would have come to England, especially to London and the other great ports, as merchants and adventurers, they left little trace. Only those who came on rare diplomatic missions are recorded.
People in England at this time, outside of those few who had direct experience of Islamic culture, had very negative and stereotypical views of Muslims. This was not helped by the one group of Muslims who did repeatedly visit England — the Barbary Pirates. They would kidnap people in raids on coastal communities and carry them off into slavery, much like the Vikings had once done. Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel was occupied as a raiding base by pirates from Salé around this time. Understandably, this did little to help how the average English person viewed Muslims in the period.
So, whilst Shiraz and Zahara could, historically, have a place at Philip Lord’s side, they could never be open about their religion outside of the necessarily tolerant, polyglot and multi-cultural community of Lord’s military company. Fortunately, as Bektashi Sufis, Zahara and Shiraz have little problem in acclimatising to that and accepting the differences in faith.
FF: Like many people in the UK, I don’t have to travel far from home to come across a site of interest from the Civil Wars: I can walk a couple of miles or so be in the middle of the Battle of Red Bank and my father-in-law told me the story of the sniper who fired on the enemy from the tower of my local church.
To come across a highly readable series like this is a great way of learning how my local knowledge fits into the whole. Can you tell us a little of how the series is going to develop?
ESH: Each book has its own individual story to tell, and usually requires Gideon to solve a murder. But the series is slowly unfolding the story of Philip Lord’s attempts to prove himself innocent of treason and to uncover his mysterious heritage. And it is that which becomes much more the focus as the series reaches its climax.
FF: I am looking forward to finding out how things develop for Sir Philip and the mysterious Covenant and its machinations. And that is the perfect, if tantalising way to end!
The Alchemist’s Plot by Eleanor Swift-Hook was published in January, 2023. It’s the fifth in her Lord’s Legacy series. The sixth will be out soon.
Eleanor has an ongoing fascination with the social, military and political events that unfolded during the Thirty Years’ War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. She lives in County Durham and loves writing stories woven into the historical backdrop of those dramatic times.
eleanorswifthook.com
She can also be contacted via Twitter: https://twitter.com/emswifthook
Fiona Forsyth is the author of the Lucius Sestius Roman mysteries.
Images:
- Philip Lord by Ian Bristow: with permission from Eleanor Swift-Hook
- English Civil War Society horse and guards parading: diamond geezer for Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
- Albrecht von Wallenstein by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1629: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Secretary and Ambassador for Muley Hamet, King of Barbary, to Queen Elizabeth I, 1600: ©University of Birmingham via Art UK
- St Oswald’s Church, Winwick, minus Civil War sniper, by Fiona Forsyth
