From Rome to Napoleon: Portchester Castle and the Castles, Customs, and Kings Blog Hop

As many of you know, I occasionally pen historical essays over at the EFHA blog.

In an effort to provide an interesting not-so-little book of bits of English history, the powers that be from that blog (particularly Debra Brown and M.M. Bennetts) gathered up and edited a collection of the essays from the blog and did a bang up of organizing them by period. The result is a nice collection of English history from well, before there was an England all the way to modern times:

 

As part of celebration of the release of the book, there's a blog hop going on focused on castles (though, just to be clear, the book subject matters covers a lot of different aspects of English history, even beyond just the customs and kings of the title). There are many fine people discussing many fine bits (and giving things away as well), and you can find their blogs here:

For my part, I decided to discuss Portchester Castle, a castle that links the ancient past of England with the perhaps more familiar to many medieval and later period.

Our fine defensive fortification tale begins before there even was an England, in the 3rd century AD. At that time, the Romans, those ancient masters of defensive positions themselves, established a fort at the location of modern day Portchester, in Hampshire along the southern England coast. The area's access to the sea allowed the Romans to use the fort as a naval base, in particular in their attempts to deal with local pirates.

Once the Romans mostly withdrew from the area, the prime location of the fort still made it useful for later groups to use for similar reasons, such as the Saxons dealing with Viking pirates. The Saxons added some additional buildings and towers in the area, and the evidence suggests continual occupation from the 4th century on, even after the departure of the Romans.

Of course, 1066 and all that brought Norman domination of England. In the 11th and 12th century, Norman lords controlled and helped fortify the area even more by adding such features as additional defensive ditches, timber palisades, and additional towers.

The castle would move from mere nobles to royalty by the end of the 12th century. Three different England kings (John, Edward II, and Richard II) would occupy that castle at various points between the 12th and 15th century, and Henry V spent some time in the castle in 1415. Every new occupant brought new fortification, expansions (e.g., royal apartments), and remodeling of the area. Other important royal leaders from English history, including Queen Elizabeth I, would also grace its halls.

Ownership shifted back from royals to "mere" aristocracy in 1632, when one Sir William Uvedale (his descendants the Thistlethwaites still retain ownership of the castle) purchased the castle from Charles I. The shift from royalty also resulted in a shift from focus, as the castle was often used as a prison for prisoners of war in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. During this time, although the defensive fortifications of the castle were not strongly upgraded compared to earlier periods, many additional wooden houses were built to house prisoners.

Coalition victories in the Napoleonic Wars would lead to less necessity for military prison in the early 19th century, with the last prisoners of the war gone from the location by 1814. The military itself would leave in 1819.

Though I am not personally one who is inclined to believe in ghosts, the long history of the castle, combined with things like the deaths of prisoners there, may have contributed to Portchester Castle's reputation as one of England's more haunted castles.

Thanks for stopping by. I encourage you to stop by and visit the various other blog hop participants listed above.

In addition, as part of the celebration,  I'm giving away an eBook copy (available in Kindle/Mobi, ePub, and PDF) of my Regency paranormal romance, A Woman of Proper Accomplishments, which doesn't feature any castles, but does reference the Napoleonic War. If you're interested, just leave a comment with a contact e-mail, and I'll pick someone next week at random.

Budgeting the Lives of Men: An interview with historical fiction author M.M. Bennetts

Today I have the pleasure of again talking with historical fiction author and Napoleonic Wars expert M.M. Bennetts.

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Prince Alexander Tchernyschev 

1) Please tell us about your book.


The new book is titled Or Fear of Peace. It opens in the summer of 1813, with a break-in and some more espionage. (I like espionage.) Then the action moves to Continental Europe--to Prussia and Saxony, France and Austria--to cover the battles there and the fall of Napoleon in 1813-14.

When I began work on Of Honest Fame, my last book, I thought it was going to end one way. Only it didn't. Book three was intended to focus on Italy and its travails during the Napoleonic period. But then, Of Honest Fame ended so fluidly, and there were, all of a sudden, all of these readers bombarding me with, "What next? What happened next?" Which I hadn't expected.

So I began to rethink and ruminate, to stop trying to impose my will on the history and the characters and let it show itself to me.

I never wanted to write a direct sequel. I had always favoured the Trollopian not-quite-a-sequel method instead. But after much consideration, I knew that there were still many issues I needed to cover with at least some of the characters from the previous book. So despite my misgivings, the new book is a sequel to the last one, and will take these characters through to the end of the war in 1814.

2) One wouldn't be surprised if an English author focused primarily on English characters and situations in a book set during the Napoleonic Wars. Now, you've done that previously with May 1812 and Of Honest Fame though you've definitely had more international situations. What made you interested in focusing more on the Russian Front of the war?

I think, generally because of Austen, we may imagine that the British weren't up to their ears in the European theatre of war. She only refers to the Napoleonic conflict obliquely. Though of course, Wellington was leading the British troops and their allies to victory against the French in Spain at the time. And that's got quite a lot of heroism and derring-do, and that's tended to be our focus if we have considered the Continental situation at all.

Also, history is taught in boxes at the university level--English history, Scottish history, Polish history, Russian history...it's like food on a child's plate, don't let the peas touch the mash and for heaven's sake don't let the mash touch the...

But that's not how it was, at least not at the end of the Napoleonic wars.

The sheer scale of the war had forced the isolationist British to forge alliance after alliance to beat Napoleon, so they were in there with both feet. The educated Russians spoke French, as did the educated Prussians and Austrians. Viscount Castlereagh spoke French adequately, although his study was always littered with French novels so that he could understand them better. His brother was a diplomatic aide to the Russians.

The Russian head of intelligence in Paris was also working with London. Pozzo di Borgo was a Corsican who worked for both the Russians and the British. And the cultural encounters and barriers that these people broke through in order to unite so that they could fight back to back and beat Napoleon and his unconquerable Grande Armee. That's an amazing story in itself!

In terms of our understanding of the situation though, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism opened up all sorts of avenues for research which had been closed to Westerners, in some cases for nearly a century. The Russian war effort against Napoleon was one of these.

I'm by nature the most side-trackable researcher and historian. I'll get fascinated by one thing which will lead me completely off and then I'll find another thing, of equal fascination, and I'll track that down. And I always want to know more. And more.

As a result of researching Of Honest Fame, I came across Adam Zamoyski's stellar 1812, about the disastrous French invasion of Russia. Subsequently, I encountered the work of Dominic Lieven and his astounding Russia Against Napoleon. He's a case of a Westerner gaining access to sources that no one has seen for maybe 150-200 years.

So suddenly, instead of a history of the Napoleonic era told by Brits to celebrate the achievements of Brits, here's a volume looking at the extra-ordinary achievement of Russia--which was a vast but in many ways backward and poor country--in opposing Napoleon from the east: recruiting and modernising the army, transporting hundreds of thousands of men across hundreds of thousands of miles, organising supply trains that stretched over half a continent. The logistics alone take one's breath away! But there was this ferocious bravery amidst all these forgotten battles too. Every page was a revelation!

That said, I've also got rerouted into the Prussian theatre of war and the splendid defence of Berlin in the autumn of 1813. Did you know there were three distinct armies formed by the allies to take Napoleon on from the east? The Army of the North was composed of Cossacks, Swedes under the former French Marechal Bernadotte (who turns out to be a bit of a skunk), and Prussians. Amazing! 

Lord Castlereagh

 

3) Tell us a little about your main characters.

Well, because of those readers I told you were nagging me, Boy Tirrell, one of the protagonists from Of Honest Fame, is obviously present and accounted for, spying and generally making a nuisance of himself.

Lord Castlereagh is also a main player--he was on the Continent from January through April 1814, as part of the Allied Command, the moving headquarters of Tsar Alexander, the Prussian King, and Metternich--the Austrian Foreign Minister. For after all, Britain was basically paying for the whole show through million-pound subsidies to the various European powers.

Captain Shuster will also once again be donning his uniform and making his presence felt in Saxony, and Dunphail will be showing his face as well.

But there are a raft of new characters too.

Charles Vane Stewart, Castlereagh's younger half-brother, was with the Russian army as an ADC. He was present at all the major battles and he's a tremendous character--he wrote his brother frequently with the inside scoop on all the operations, following the death of his wife in 1812 he suffered from depression, he drank like a fish, he was wild, handsome, effervescent and utterly charming.

I've also found a rather superlative Russian envoy, diplomat, spy and General in the Russian Army, who led these columns of Cossacks against the retreating French, harassing them, nabbing their couriers, creating these clouds of confusion around the French commanders so that they often didn't have a clue where they were meant to be or who they were meant to be linking up with. Because of him, and his Cossacks, often the Allies knew far more about the French movements than the French did. It's all great stuff and he's just fantastic.

4) You've previously described your first book as a "love/war story examining domestic crises" and your second book as "Bennetts without the nice". What does that make this third book?


Ha ha ha. Can I get back to you on that one?

It's about the war.

There was so much more to this war than most of us can even comprehend. So many more battles, battles which utterly destroyed the villages where people had lived and worked for centuries. The pillaging of whole countries. And in 1813-14, here were these four vast armies of 200,000-300,000 men plus horses, camped our across Central Europe--from Poland across Austria, Saxony, Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic) and all the way north to the Baltic Sea, consuming everything in sight and then going hungry. Deserters everywhere--the just laid down their arms and melted away. The refugee problem was a crisis beyond mentioning.

And there's almost nothing written about it all in English. Traditionally, we've just looked the other way. I can't do that.

5) A lot of brilliant historical work has been done in recent decades that has given us far greater insight into the Napoleonic Wars from the both the perspective of the English and the French. Can you tell us a bit about the status of historical research and materials as far as the Russian-related campaigns?

The Russian experience of the war is just opening up for historians, really. And it's slow work, primarily because of the language barrier. But there's also the West's decades-old lack of trust in the Russians. A lot of which, actually, turns out to have started with Napoleonic propaganda.

For example, French lore about the taking of Paris by the Russians in April 1814 tell us that the streets were filled with these unclean, shaggy, ferocious creatures on shaggy ponies--Cossacks--and they were abusive to the Parisians, etc. But that turns out to be propaganda. Alexander had kept back his best regiments for the taking of Paris and when he led them into the city, they were all in their newest, most polished, best uniforms. And they were welcomed. It was a dazzling spectacle, just as Alexander intended it to be. He saw himself as Europe's saviour and that's how he presented himself in Paris. There was no looting. No pillage. And the Cossacks who did ride into the city, they may have looked outlandish to Parisian eyes, but they weren't the savages the press latterly made them out to be.

And there's an even greater absence of source material on Prussia and on their contribution to the defeat of Napoleon. And they were absolutely key. But at the moment, I'm working from one of the few books in English to treat the defence of Berlin in 1813.

So although I hope like anything to get everything correct, I equally sincerely hope that this is only the beginning of our research and recognition that the defeat of Napoleon was a massive Allied effort: it took all of Europe fighting together to bring him down, with all hands contributing as and however they could.

6) The Russian winter did quite the number on the Grand Armée, but the Russians certainly helped things along by making sure there would be nothing for the French as they moved deeper into Russia. Of course, the French paid dearly in lives, but what sort of impact did this combination of scorched Earth and Fabian strategies have on the Russians?

There are two sides to that. The French beggared the countries in which they were quartered before the invasion. And Napoleon intended, as he always did, to have his troops live off the land. But the harvest was late in 1812, so there was nothing for his troops nor for his horses to eat. Probably half his army had died of dysentery, starvation and dehydration before they ever crossed the border into Russia.

Then too, it can be very hard for anyone to understand just how vast Russia is. Napoleon may have invaded Russia and it may have made mincemeat of him and his troops, but there was so much more to Russia than he could ever comprehend. He only dipped his toe in.

His invasion did leave the Russian army in pretty bad nick. Yes. But Kutuzov, the Russian general, was very wise in retreat and by pulling back and pulling back, he did much to save the heart of the army allowing them enough R&R so they could live to fight another day.

Equally, within about five minutes of Napoleon's retreat, the orders went out for massive mobilisation to refill the ranks of the army. Equally, the Russian civil service threw its whole might into requisitioning not just grain, but also horses, carts for transport, uniforms, wood for grain depots. With Napoleon's retreat too, the ports were once again open to British trade--and British subsidies started flowing in.

But never underestimate the sacrifice and determination of the Russian peoples to get another army together to once and for all rid Europe of the man they considered the anti-Christ.

7) In the end, Napoleon was defeated. Many historical perspectives on him are written from the perspectives of the winners and paint a portrait of a talented yet egotistical man who ultimately let his reach exceed his grasp. Some historians have suggested that Napoleon gets a bit of a bad rap and that he wasn't any worse than many ambitious leaders at the time. He even had some rather modern ideas about things social mobility and education. Others point out that the Napoleonic Wars devastated Europe and, in many ways, that level of Continental warfare would not be repeated until The War To End All Wars, World War I. Could you give us your thoughts on Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars?


If I take a step back from my current work, I'd have to say there are probably several periods in Napoleon's rule and some were definitely more constructive and positive than others.

France, when Napoleon launched his coup, was a mess. And he brought a sense of order to a fragmenting chaotic country. With his rule, people started to know where they were once more and could function in some proper way for the first time in years.

But over time, that proper sense of order was eroded and replaced with a military dictatorship, conquering and ruling over Europe like the greatest of all Mafia kings, and that wasn't so good. His complete and utter disregard for human life sits at odds with any developing sense of morality or human rights. He used to say, "I have an income of 85,000 troops a year" and he always outspent himself. And this constant demand for more troops, the dreadful burden of conscription, decimated the European population. They didn't call it 'the blood tax' for nothing. Outside of France, he was hated.

We consider his rule from the point of view of the French Empire because he was very good at self-promotion. But what about from the point of view of the conquered nations? The Italians? The Prussians? The Saxons? The Dutch? The Spanish? The Poles? How was it for them? How was it to watch your young men be taken--often in chains--off to fight someone else's war, knowing that your son, brother, husband would never return? These are the questions I ask myself about the period.

On the battlefield, in his prime, no one could beat Napoleon. But he believed his own propaganda. And that's always a disaster--it made him beatable.

He certainly was crazed with egomania. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. And that led him to doing very stupid things. For example, all of his marechals and generals, whilst they may have been super at executing his orders, they lacked initiative, or even intelligence--without him pulling their strings, they fell to bits, they argued with each other, they fell to robbing the districts where they were lodged, they were insubordinate, they couldn't manage their own troops. Which isn't so great when you're trying to fight a war on more than one front.

And I think that by the end, by 1814, he had become a deranged monster. The suffering he inflicted on France was unspeakable. I'm not saying he hadn't brought the same measures of deprivation and disaster everywhere else he visited. He had. He fully, whenever he deemed it appropriate, unleashed the most horrific levels of terror upon resisting populations.

But do you know, when the Prussians invaded France in the spring of 1814--though they were well-up for a spot of pillage and looting as payback for what the French had done to them--their letters back home are full of their shock at the poverty and destitution of eastern France. They didn't loot and pillage, there was literally nothing to take. Napoleon had taken it all already.

He lost the war and his army was conquered in 1814 frankly because he ran out of everything. He'd lost over half a million troops in Russia in 1812. He lost 175,000 horses there as well. He'd raised another vast army by late spring 1813, but he couldn't replace the horses--so very little cavalry, and no supply trains. Then he fought the Allies at Leipzig and lost. Spectacularly. 73,000 French casualties.

And he couldn't afford that--he couldn't replace those troops. France was exhausted and he no longer had the manpower of his satellite states to draw upon either. The Banque de France was out of money. There was nothing for his remaining soldiers to eat and some 25% of them had typhus anyway. He had brought France and his army to their knees. There was nothing left. It took Europe nearly 100 years to recover the pre-Revolutionary population numbers. It was Greek tragedy, but on a continental scale.

8) There's a lot of fertile literary ground in the Napoleonic Wars. Do you intend to keep writing about this period or do you have something else in mind for future works?

Well, I've already begun the research for a novel set during the invasion of France in 1814, but this time from the point of view of the British army who invaded with Wellington, fighting their way through Spain and over the Pyrenees into southwestern France. So that's next. I think. If I don't get side-tracked. Ha ha ha.

And there's always the Congress of Vienna. So many parties. So many diplomats. So much spying.

As always, it's been such a pleasure to visit with you, J.A., and talk about this stuff which is so close to my heart. Thank you for having me.

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Thanks, M.M.

If you'd like to read more from M.M., please visit her blog at http://www.mmbennetts.com/.

If you'd like to read an earlier interview with M.M., please click here.

Mr. Beard's Regency Tour Day 18: Guerrillas and the Peninsular War: What's the French Word for Ulcer?

This is part of my continuing series on Regency England and Georgian England. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please check out my archive here.

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Napoleon's failures in Russia are well-known, but even before that invasion, the "unstoppable" French Imperial Army struggled in the Peninsular War against another set of foes that weren't helped nearly as much by the weather.

Over at the English Historical Fiction Authors Blog, I discuss the guerrilla forces that gave Napoleon such trouble.

Mr. Beard's Regency Tour Day 15: What's a Little War Between Fashionable Friends? English respect for the French during the Regency

Welcome to my continuing series on late Georgian/Regency England. If you haven't a clue what I'm talking about, please check out this post.

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Large swaths of British and French history are defined by the two nations, in various forms, waging war against each other. The latter Georgian period was no different. The political shockwave of the French Revolution lead to war with the French Revolutionary forces; wars that England participated in.

Though the 1802 of Treaty of Amiens temporarily ended hostilities between Great Britain and France, 1803 brought the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, which would rage, in one form or another until 1815.

In 1805, Emperor Napoleon's dreams of quickly invading and smashing the British were thwarted by stalwart sailors under the command of Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson. The dramatic Battle of Trafalgar cost Nelson and many sailors their lives but ensured the nearly 200,000-man army Napoleon had gathered would never be delivered to the English coast.

At the start of the Regency, Napoleon was bogged down in the Peninsular Campaign (the so-called "Spanish Ulcer"), a struggle against Spanish and Portuguese forces (making heavy use of guerrilla tactics) and aided by regular support from the British under Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. The British government poured large amounts off money both into military efforts and espionage. Temporary defeat in 1813 sent the French emperor into exile for a short period. His final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 ended his dream of a unified Europe under his control.

With all the wars leading into the Regency and the wars persisting for a good chunk of the period, one might assume that the Regency English despised all things French. The truth, however, is more complicated.

The bulk of English citizenry were rather anti-French even though there was some debate about how much the country should be involved in the war. There was some concern, even after Trafalgar, about how much blood and treasure it was worth to fight Napoleon. The Royal Navy dominated the seas, and helped disrupt Napoleon's attempts at economic blockade. There was not a significant concern about another French invasion plan.

A perhaps more unexpected attitude, though, prevailed among many fashionable sorts of the upper-aristocracy. France, even as the nation rampaging across Europe, was still seen as a center of fashion and culture. The ability to speak French was considered both fashionable and a sign of respectable education, and not a mark of suspicion.

French fashions and foods remained  popular. Even as Napoleon attempted to strangle trade into Great Britain, the upper-classes still managed to import (or smuggle in) French goods. French fashions continued to influence the English.

Of course, depending on one's perspective that may not seem that odd until you consider it'd be roughly equivalent to the aristocratic elites during World War I and World War II spending a lot of time speaking German at parties, decorating their homes with German objects, being influenced by German fashion, et cetera (insert your own joke about Edward VIII here). The war, for this fashionable elite, was a mere inconvenience.

In the short interval between the Treaty of Amiens and the restoration of hostilities, the fashionable elite did their best to travel to Paris to enjoy its glories before the two nations began shooting each other again. Even after the aborted invasion of England, there was no serious turn by many in the upper-classes against all things fashionably French even if they were limited in their ability to go to France and attempt to hob-nob with top French officials, Napoleon, and the Empress Josephine.

Of course, to many sons of the aristocracy serving as officers either in the Army or the Royal Navy, France was not a source of fashion and fine food, but instead the lead being blasted at them on the battlefield.

Now, as noted earlier, the vast bulk of the citizenry took a dim view of France and all things French, fashionable or not. Love of French culture wasn't universal either among aristocrats, but it still was significant enough that even the Prince Regent himself publicly partook of all things French.

English Secret Agents and Sprawling Continental Espionage--Not 007, but 1812: An interview with historical fiction author M.M. Bennetts

Today, I'm talking with historical fiction author M.M. Bennetts about her latest novel of espionage during the Napoleonic Wars, Of Honest Fame.

1) Tell us about your book.

The novel is titled, Of Honest Fame, and it opens on a summer night in 1812 as a boy sets fire to a house in Paris before escaping over the rooftops. Carrying vital intelligence about Napoleon’s Russian campaign, he heads for England.  But landing in Kent, he is beaten nearly to death.

The Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, is desperate for the boy’s information.  But he is even more desperate to track down the boy’s assailant – a sadistic French agent who knows far too much about British intelligence network.

Captain George Shuster is a veteran of the Peninsula, an aide-de-camp to Wellington, now recalled from the continent and struggling to adjust to civilian life.  Thomas Jesuadon is a dissolute, living on the fringes of society, but with an unrivalled knowledge of the seamy underside of the capital.  Setting out to trace the boy’s attacker, they journey from the slums of London to the Scottish coast, following a trail of havoc, betrayal, official incompetence and murder.  It takes an unlikely encounter with a frightened young woman to give them the breakthrough that will turn the hunter into the hunted.

Meanwhile, the boy travels the breadth of Europe in the wake of the Grande Armée, witnessing at first hand the ruination they leave behind and the awful price of Napoleon’s ambition.

2) If there's one constant throughout the history of mankind, it's warfare. What attracted you to the Napoleonic Wars versus other periods of struggle?

Well, until about 1917 or so, the Napoleonic wars were universally referred to as The Great War.  It was the first World War and it was total war, unlike the conflicts of the seventeeth and eighteenth century. It stunted or eliminated the industrial revolution across the Continent, but as a by-product turned Great Britain into the premier industrial and naval power of the 19th century.  It swept away national borders and traditional governmental structures (many of which had been around since the Middle Ages) across the Continent and brought Russia as a power-player into western politics for the first time.  And it took the lives of over probably six million people--that's more than half the population of Britain at the time.  It took Europe 100 years to recover the population levels it had had in 1789.  It was a man-made catastrophe such as the world had before never seen.

But it wasn't the warfare that first captured my imagination.  It was the architecture. 

I'd been specialising as a mediaevalist, with a particular focus on Quattrocento Italy which is also a period of great upheaval--religious, intellectual, artistic, political...and I was living on a large estate where the big house was one of Robert Adam's first designs, before he came south to England.  And I was popping down to Edinburgh, which is a gorgeous Georgian city, about once a fortnight...

And so there I was, sitting in front of the coal fire, preparing for my orals with everything ever written about Quattrocento Roman churches by Palladio open in front of me and there, hidden amongst the books, I had John Summerson's Georgian London.  I already had, if you will, a mental 'in' with the period.  I had intended to be a concert pianist until not too long before that, and I had lots of Beethoven in my repertoire, so you might say, in that sense, I already understood how they thought.  Music is the great open door for getting inside the heads of those who've gone before us. 

At the same time, I'd been reading Dorothy Dunnett's sequence of novels set in 16th century Europe and I was agog.  She combined all the disciplines and all the countries--art, music, poetry, politics, diplomacy, economics, the war against Suleiman the Great's empire--and put them together to present life as a whole.  And I thought, that's it.  I want to do that.  I want to write books like that!  (I must have some terrier blood in my ancestry somewhere, because I just started reading and researching absolutely everything I could find on the period and not letting go of the trail.)

3) What inspired you to focus on the typically lesser-known espionage battles rather than the grand field campaigns or the desperate guerrilla struggles of the Napoleonic Wars?

Well, this is a very funny thing.  Until just recently--like about five minutes ago--all British histories or historical fiction ever looked at was either the Peninsular campaign as led by Wellington, or the Royal Navy as led by Nelson.  Which isn't surprising.  These are tales of great heroism and derring-do.  And who wants to read about disasters like the Walcheran campaign, anyway?  That would suck.  Then too, for the most part, we didn't have troops involved in Europe (though we did often have advisors there) so "British history" just ignores all the rest.  It's that simple. 

It was like this at the time, too, though.  The British press of 1812-14 was completely transfixed by the raunchy marital discords of the Prince Regent and Princess Caroline, and the marital prospects of their only daughter, Princess Charlotte. 

Then too, the Victorians didn't approve of the Regency.  And it wasn't just a matter of the perceived immorality of the age.  It was that the Regency didn't suit their vision of what Britain should be, in any way.  And for a lot of the Victorian statesmen, the Regency and the Napoleonic Wars had been what they did in their youth--a bit like being Flower children, one suspects.  So there was just this blanket whitewash.  They kept the national heroes, Wellington (who was Prime Minister) and Nelson, and jettisoned the rest. 

Add to that another 'funny thing' which is that until recently historians and the British establishment denied that Britain ever 'spied' on anyone.  The line has always been, "Oh no, that's what those nasty Froggies do.  We don't engage in that kind of thing.  We are, after all, gentlemen..."  So there was nothing to be found on it.  Just this blank wall of denial. 

Anyway, over the past decade I would say, there's been a lot of opening up of these previously denied or ignored cans of worms.  There have been several well-received histories of the Napoleonic Wars that have been about the whole war, rather than just our little bit of it.  There's been a determination to look again and to ferret out 'what really happened' rather than relying on the so-called historical truths passed down through two centuries' of Whig historians.  There's been some fine work done on the intelligence war--Elizabeth Sparrow is the leader in this field.  

But there's been more available about Sir Sydney Smith--who definitely did his bit in the intelligence war.  And Cochrane's exploits have been published.  So it's only recently been possible to gain access to the kind of information that would support a novel on the intelligence war.

And let's face it, the struggles of the guerrillas in Spain have been done to death.  I mean, it would be utterly stupid to set oneself up against the might of Bernard Cornwell and the Sharpe novels.  What's curious there too, though, is that similar local struggles against the Napoleonic state--like in Naples and in Germany--those have been completely ignored.  (Though I've just got my hands on some stuff about Italy, so I'm really chuffed about that...)

4) The geographical scope of this novel is on a par with any modern espionage adventure. Is this reflective of the struggles of this period or was this somewhat enhanced to interest modern readers?

The former.

I initially thought the novel was going to switch back and forth between London and Paris.  And I thought it was going to have a strong smuggling element too--to which end I did a lot of research about smugglers in the New Forest and in Rye.  (Which hardly got used at all.) 

But then, I read Adam Zamoyski's stellar 1812:  Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow, and it blew my socks away.  The atrocities, the wanton destruction of Poland and Prussia and of all those men--I couldn't get it out of my head.  Those thousands upon thousands of refugees!  What happened to them?

Also I knew that regardless of what Napoleon's propaganda machine said, the French army committed atrocities across Europe (Spain as detailed by Goya was not a one-off) and I had to write about it.  It just wouldn't leave me alone.  And by that point, I'll be honest, it was becoming a different novel from anything I'd planned--the synopsis had gone onto the floor to be trampled and chewed up by the dog, and I just wrote--researching the segments that take place in Poland and Bohemia as I went. 

5) The very nature of espionage often means that those involved leave less of a historical footprint than then soldiers and generals on the battlefield. Did you find this a difficult subject to research and did you need to fill in a lot of the blanks?

Well, yes and no. 

Yes, in that there were probably dozens of spies we don't know anything about. 

But Elizabeth Sparrow has found so much documentary evidence about the British end of the business, it gets a bit silly.  They spent millions of pounds on intelligence--we're talking sums that I cannot even begin to comprehend.  And there was no audit.  Not ever.  The government ministers would just hand the dosh out as they saw fit and they were all united in their belief that Parliament shouldn't be told and shouldn't know anything about it, though they did keep records of a sort.  So there are these money trails.  And names and itineraries. 

And that's only the English side of things. 

There's been quite a lot of work done in France on Fouche--the famed and feared French minister of police--but he, it turns out, was probably in British pay.  Which is why the French 'caught' so few British spies.  The Russian court was so full of spies, you wonder who wasn't a spy.  The Tsar had his official spies and then he had his private spies, because he didn't trust the court spies.  Metternich and the Austrian secret service had spies everywhere and wrote down and annotated everything, so it's all there for one to see...

6) The late Georgian Period is often glamorized by many authors despite the tumult of both the Napoleonic Wars and social unrest in England. What drew you to these more gritty aspects of the period?

I think this goes back to our fondness for putting history in boxes.  Here we have the heroic military history with Nelson and Wellington.  Huzzah and thrice huzzah!  Here we have the Industrial Revolution and the Luddite backlash against that--but that's up North, so we don't need to think about that, do we? 

Here we have Napoleon.  But his wife wore pretty dresses, so he must be 'all right', mustn't he?  Here we have Beethoven writing all this very non-Mozart-like music--what did he have to do with the world, he was deaf.   And here we have the Romantic poets--they were just looking at lice and mountains and things, so they're too artsy fartsy to count.  And the Tsar?  Well, he was Russian--he didn't even speak English...so what could he have to do with Jane Austen?  (Except that he visited Britain in the summer of 1814 and the whole country turned out to see him--he was the hero of the age!  He had defeated the anti-Christ, Napoleon.) 

It's like a TV dinner with all the tasty bits separated into the little trays and nothing touches.  But history's not like that.  Life's not like that.  It's one great big pot of beef stew, all bubbling and roiling away, with tomatoes and carrots and garlic and onions, mushrooms and herbs and dumplings and half a bottle of good wine chucked in... 

Then too, history or the perception of history has undergone quite a transformation in the last decade.  There are all the Horrible Histories for children by Terry Deary.  We have Dan Cruikshank looking into old buildings--so much of the London we love was built on the earnings of prostitution.  Dan Snow did a series on the telly all about how different cities smelled 200 years ago.  (At which point we were all grateful our tellies didn't come with scratch and sniff screens.) 

We've got forensic scientists analysing the bones found in the Napoleonic mass graves from Smolensk and what they're telling us about how these men died and what diseases they were carrying is a lot different from Napoleon's official version.  There's Amanda Vickery reading all the letters and journals of late Georgian women and showing how what we think they lived like isn't what it was like, at all.  There are biographers writing about people like Beau Brummell and refusing to be coy about the syphilis that killed him.  There's this united determination to get at the truth, whatever that may be  (even if it doesn't ultimately sit well with our pre-conceived notion of what a BBC costume drama should look like) and a determination to understand. 

Then too, I do live in a combined 17th century and Georgian house, so you might say I'm on intimate terms with the Georgians' foibles...with their draughty windows which aren't set straight in the walls, with their wonky ceilings, their interesting ideas about how many fireplaces one room requires, with their cobbled together doors that don't match each other, with the doorframes upon which anyone over 5'10" will bean themselves, with cleaning the ashes from the grate...

7) Your debut novel also focused on the espionage aspects of the Napoleonic Wars. How are your two novels similar and how are they different?

The first novel is Bennetts writing a love/war story and examining the domestic crises of May 1812--chiefly the assassination of the Prime Minister on 11 May 1812.  

So in the first, there's a focus on the 'wholeness' of life of those who lived at the time and worked in government circles.  Their lives weren't neatly compartmentalised.  Viscount Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary and Wellington's closest ally and friend, was the husband of a patroness of Almack's and regularly turned up there to see her.  He had a vastly active social life at the same time as he was sitting up in the House of Commons till all hours as Leader of the House.  And he went on to be one of the greatest Foreign Secretaries the world has ever seen. 

And I really wanted to do something with that lovely Russian literary form, the slice of life.  But I left out the gulags and the borscht, and instead did a month in the life of a chap who worked in the Foreign Office.  So it's, if you will, the Home Front--because, don't get me wrong--Britain was entirely unique at the time.  It was the one country which hadn't suffered the devastation of French invasion--it was a haven of a green, untrampled landscape!  And they loved it for that.

The second book has been described as 'Bennetts without the nice'.  The world of espionage--which was a key element of the war against Napoleon, particularly as Britain was subsidising the Austrian, Prussian and Russian efforts against France to the tune of millions of pounds--provided this fantastic window through which to look at all sorts of aspects of the Napoleonic wars that normally get swept aside:  the police state that was France, the refugee crisis, the aching loss of it all, and the contrast between Britain which had suffered none of the depredations of war and Europe which was rent by war.  And who doesn't want to write a cracking historical thriller?

----

M.M. out for a bit of a canter.

Thanks for stopping by, M.M.

If you'd like to read more from M.M., please check out her website at http://www.mmbennetts.com/.

Of Honest Fame can be found at the following retailers:

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