The Winter Sea

ABOUT THE CHARACTERS

Any work of historical fiction relies on real people. With very few exceptions—little Anna, and the servants at Slains, and Sophia—the characters from the eighteenth-century story are real, and their actions are bound by the limits of what truly happened.

Not that finding out what truly happened in the ’08 is an easy thing. All sides, for their own purposes, tried hard to cover up the truth, and even what was written by the people who lived through it can’t be trusted. I’m indebted to John S Gibson’s masterfully succinct history of events surrounding the invasion, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708, the book that first inspired me to write about the period, and to Colonel Nathaniel Hooke’s wonderfully detailed memoir of the incident, published in 1760 as The Secret History of Colonel Hooke’s Negotiations in Scotland, in Favor of the Pretender. I was fortunate enough to find an original copy of Hooke’s account that not only became one of the treasures of my home library, but also proved invaluable in sorting out the movements of my characters.

I’ve tried, wherever possible, to seek out the best evidence—the letters and the transcripts of the time. If an account was written down of what was said between two people, then I’ve had them say the same thing in my book. If Captain Gordon’s ship was in Leith harbor on a certain day, I’ve put him there. I’ve used this rule with even minor characters: “Mr Hall” was the alias commonly used by the priest Father Carnegy when he traveled in public on Jacobite business, and his visits to Slains on behalf of the Duke of Hamilton are a matter of fact, as is Mr Malcolm’s part in the invasion, and his going into hiding when it failed.

That said, I have taken a couple of liberties. For all the research I’ve done on John Moray, I don’t know for certain that he was at Malplaquet. But since the only reference to his death that I have found fits with the date of Malplaquet, and since it helped my plot to have him there, I put him on that battlefield, where in the woods the Royal Irish Regiment in fact did meet and fight the Irish Regiment that fought for France and James.

And while it’s also a recorded fact that Captain Gordon captured the Salisbury during the invasion, and that he was the only British captain in the fight to claim a French ship as his prize, there’s also little doubt that Gordon was a Jacobite. And since no one but Gordon knows exactly why he took that ship, I gave him an excuse that seemed to fit the man as I had come to know him.

His Jacobite loyalties lasted the rest of his life. When Queen Anne died in 1714 and the first Hanoverian king, George I, was brought over to sit on the British throne, Gordon refused to take the oath of allegiance, and as a result was dismissed. He promptly accepted a commission in the Russian navy of Tsar Peter the Great, where he served with distinction and rose to be an admiral and the Governor of Kronstadt. Throughout his time in Russia he continued to promote the Jacobite cause, and kept up a correspondence with King James and his supporters. When he died in the spring of 1741, a wealthy and respected man, his obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine stated he had always been ‘a true Friend to his Countrymen.’

The Duke of Hamilton was not to be so fortunate. By 1711 his ambition was beginning to bear fruit—he’d been raised to the British peerage by Queen Anne, and had just been appointed ambassador to France. But before he could travel to Paris to take up his post, his longstanding dispute with a rival, Lord Mohun, flared into a duel. The two men met at dawn in Hyde Park, London, one November morning. Both men drew their swords, and in the fight that followed both were killed. The incident caused quite a scandal in its day, and the details of what really happened and why have been debated ever since. In death, as in life, he defies all attempts at an easy analysis.

As for Moray’s uncle, Colonel Patrick Graeme, it is not difficult to trace his early life in Scotland, when he served as Captain of the Edinburgh Town Guard before his conscience made him take up arms for old King James and follow James to France in exile. But I haven’t yet discovered how he spent his later years, after the failed invasion in ’08. However, since I’m sure his nature would have kept him near the action, I am hopeful that I’ll someday come across a letter or a document that shines a light on his adventures in that time before his death in August, 1720.

More light, too, is needed on Anne Drummond, Countess of Erroll, who becomes all but invisible in the years following the ’08—no easy task for a woman of such forceful character.

Her son Charles, 13th Earl of Erroll, continued to fight for the rights of his countrymen after the Union which he had so passionately opposed. Though his position as Lord High Constable of Scotland meant he was expected to take part in the coronation of George I, he refused to attend the ceremony. He died not long after, in 1717, at the age of 40, unmarried and childless, the last male of his line. His title passed to his sister Mary who, like all the Countesses of Erroll, was a woman of great courage and a fierce supporter of the Stewart cause.

Nathaniel Hooke, who had put so much time and effort into bringing about the invasion of 1708, was deeply disappointed by its failure, and highly critical of the French commander who had led it. Though he had a long and successful career in the diplomatic service of France, he returned to his memories of the ’08 in his later years, and with the help of his nephew began compiling his various papers and journals relating to the adventure. He died in 1738, before the task was completed, and when his son attempted to sell the papers two years later an officer of the French court arrived instead to confiscate them. Those papers that were taken were presumably destroyed, and lost to history. But two packets of documents in Hooke’s nephew’s handwriting had escaped the attention of the French official, who luckily for us had no idea they contained Hooke’s own account of his negotiations for the planned invasion.

Of such small unexpected accidents is history made.

And no one was the victim of more accidents than young James Stewart—by his birthright James VIII of Scotland and III of England. There is some reason to suspect that his half-sister Queen Anne was indeed giving serious thought to naming James her heir, and in the last years of her reign there appears to have been a great deal of behind-the-scenes negotiating going on. In the midst of this, the war of the Spanish succession was ended by the Treaty of Utrecht, which among its terms demanded that Louis XIV expel James from France. James went willingly, moving his court to Lorraine where he promptly gave all of his Protestant servants the freedom to worship in their own faith, something he hadn’t been able to do when his court had been bound by French laws.

But James was still a Catholic, and when Queen Anne died in 1714 it was the Protestant contender, George I, who won the crown.

The reply was another Jacobite rising in 1715, and although this time James did manage to land safely in Scotland, just north of Slains at Peterhead, the golden opportunity of 1708 had passed. The western Presbyterians who had been so prepared in the ’08 to rise for James this time opposed him. The rebellion failed. James retreated to Lorraine, but King Louis XIV had died and without the old king to console and support him James found his French neighbors unwelcoming, so he moved his court again, at first to Avignon, and finally Rome.

Two more attempts to gain his throne involving the help of the Swedes and the Spanish came to nothing, and even James’s marriage in 1719 to the Princess Maria Clementina proved less than successful. After six years, she left him and retired to a convent, though not before she gave him sons. The elder of these, Charles Edward, grew to be that ‘Bonnie Prince’ whose handsome face and charming ways would rouse the Scottish Jacobites to take up arms again and march beside him twenty-five years later…but that is another story, and too sad to tell.

I much prefer to think of James VIII and III in his old age in Rome, perhaps half-dozing in the sunshine of a warm Italian afternoon, and dreaming of the northern coast of Scotland and the proud red walls of Slains as he’d once seen them from the sea, and of the crown that must have, for that moment, seemed so nearly within reach.