Tidelands

There is a wealth of material about working people and working women from historians who are interested in the supporters of Cromwell and parliament—so ordinary people. Though there is nothing (that I could find) about people living in this particular area, there are surveys and reports of poor parts of England as the armies went through. For unruly women there are criminal court records, and a lot of complaints from ministers and vicars and magistrates. There are records of midwives, and herbalists, and of course there is a wealth of documentary evidence when literate men (almost always men) supervised witchcraft hunts and trials and so reported (probably the first time they had ever considered) the private lives of poor women.

History is said to be written by the winners. But your novels tend to show what it is like to be both in the favor of the powerful and out of favor with the powerful. What inspired you to make James a spy for the losing side?

James is a spy for the elite—the upper classes—so he starts his life as one of the “winners.” His family adhered to the Roman Catholic faith when the rest of the country turned Protestant, but there were many elite Catholics who survive to this day. He would have thought he was on the winning side for most of the war, and I don’t think he genuinely imagines defeat until he is responsible for one of the many failed escape attempts by the captured king. Of course, ultimately, he is on the winning side, as the monarchy is restored in the king’s son Charles II.

In fiction terms, I wanted a character who would be able to show the weakness of the monarchy case and a character who would expose Alinor to more danger. This was a civil war; it divided families and I wanted to show that, too. Also—this was a book that was very fictional in process as well as outcome—as I was writing, James ran into the book, as he does into Alinor’s life, and he turned out to be a royalist spy. I didn’t know that was what he would be when he first arrived. I thought he would be a recusant priest, but all the rest unfolded.

When you wrote the scene between James and King Charles, was there anything in your research that particularly helped you portray the king?

There’s a lot of biographical material about the king and especially about his deterioration during his imprisonment. There are quite a lot of accounts of failed rescue attempts at this stage of his imprisonment, too, so there was a lot of history and historians’ opinions to draw on to write this completely fictional scene.

I was especially interested in Charles’s change of attitude during his captivity. From his own letters we know that he started confident that he could outwit and outnegotiate the parliamentary representatives, and he was certain that he would negotiate a return to his throne. This was partly because he was convinced that kingship was a state of being, a divinely appointed state, which nothing could alter. He thought everyone would come to realize that they could arrest him but that being a king was intrinsic to him—he would always be king. Ultimately, I think he came to think that to be a martyred king was the best way to demonstrate this.

It’s hard for us in the modern world to imagine that someone should think that they are a genuinely superior being to another person—we’re so inculcated with democracy now! But Charles believed that he had been chosen by God to be king of England and that meant that he was father to his people, and that they could not reject this relationship.

Your novels about royalty are told from the first-person perspective.Tidelandsis written in the third person. Why did you decide to make this change? Was it a challenge or a thrill?

The first-person characters are women at the royal courts and include commoners (like Mary Boleyn) and indeed imposters (like Hannah in The Queen’s Fool), so the point of moving from first to third person was not about status but about the story I wanted to tell.