Nancy E. Blanton's Blog, page 11

Cruelty in the wild west of Ireland

Part 2 in the series: How I found the snow path to Dingle

At the end of my last post, I began the adventure to discover the meaning of the phrase in my head, “the snow path to Dingle” which ultimately led to the book Sharavogue. Where else could my research begin, but Dingle? Many tourists to Ireland venture out on this far-west peninsula, but if you have never been there it is an amazing mix of sugar-white beaches, dark clumpy bogs, castle ruins, rocky mountain passes, harbor towns with fishing boats bobbing on the water, lush green pastures, lively pubs and gourmet restaurants tucked amid colorful village shops and businesses. Most would never guess the horrors that once took place there.

I started my research on the Internet, but this was several years ago and the web was not the robust information resource that it is today. Still, one of the first things I found was the story of the Seige of Smerwick. According to one source:

Smerwick was originally a Viking settlement and its name originates from the Norse words ‘smoer’ and ‘wick’ meaning ‘butter harbour’. Although denoted as Smerwick on charts the area is now officially known by the Irish name ‘Ard na Caithne’, meaning ‘height of the arbutus’ or strawberry tree.

It is a sweet name that helps to obscure a bitter past. In 1580, 600 Italian and Spanish troops landed here, funded by the Pope to aid a rebellion against English forces in Ireland. The garrison became isolated on a narrow tip of the peninsula, with English artillery on the land side and naval forces on the sea. Earl Gray laid seige to the garrison and their defenses crumbled after three days. Gray rejected their request for terms, insisted on unconditional surrender, then sent his bands in to execute the 600, sparing only those of higher rank. The soldiers were beheaded, their bodies flung into the sea and their heads buried in a field. The ranking offers were offered life if they renounced their Catholic faith, and if they did not their legs and arms were broken in three places, they were left to suffer for a day, and then hanged.

This story was horrible and unforgettable to me, though I was not sure I wanted to write about it. In the end I gave it only a passing mention because I chose to write of a not less brutal time about 80 years later. What this story did was ignite my passion for research into the dramatic history of Ireland. And I learned how magic and exciting research can be.

One of the best things I did was become a “friend” of the University of Washington Library, which means I paid a small fee for access to books and documents. I learned that the library doesn’t “stock” everything, but populates its shelves with things as professors and research assistants request documents and publications for their research projects. Then they are available to the lay person. I learned not to be disappointed if the book that I wanted was not sitting in the stacks where it was supposed to be, because I would inevitably find even more interesting things waiting for me that I had not found in the catalog. Just to pick up those books and thumb through them brought magical surprises that led me in specific directions.

One day I stumbled across a book that had interviews with Irish people describing the devastation left in the wake of Oliver Cromwell’s march in 1649 and 1650, and one man’s description of the horrible omen the he was certain foretold Cromwell’s coming: It was a full yellow moon encircled by blood and cleaved in two.

I was fascinated. I had found a time that I needed to know much more about. I was hooked.

How I found the snow path to Dingle

I feel it is a great honor when readers share with me that they read my book, Sharavogue, and then describe the parts that affected them most. In a few cases it has actually sent a chill up my spine because, well, it is every writer’s dream that her writing will be enjoyed and will actually touch someone. In that sense, it is really a dream come true.

People ask all sorts of questions, but several have told me they’d be interested in learning about my writing process. I’m flattered, and a little embarrassed. I’ve been less than methodical in my research, so probably not a good model. But, everyone has their story, right? So in honor of my new friend Joan Butler, today I’m starting a series of posts about just that. I’m expecting it to be about 10 or 12 posts, and will gladly take questions from readers to cover a specific topic.

This being first in the series, I’m starting at the beginning — how I got started writing this book in the first place. So hold on to your jammies, here goes. We’re going back. Way back:

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid. Alone in my bedroom, maybe 10 years old, I wrote little stories about dogs and squirrels and gave them to my mother to read (top secret, of course, because if my sisters had known about them they’d have teased me relentlessly). And Mother in Heaven forgive me, once I even had a story about a swan on a lake. (I know, it’s been done…) My poor mother had to come listen to it accompanied by me on my ukelele (I thought the instrument was cute and had to have it, but never actually learned how to play it…). My father always called me “the dreamer.” Little did he know.

In grade school and then college I continued my dreams. I dabbled in English, and then Education, until my roommate finally convinced me: If you want to write, study journalism! I did and have never regretted it, but in a way it distracted me from those stories. And my career drifted even further, from journalism to corporate communications, until I believed my stories were gone for good.

The last time I saw my father alive was in the fall of 1996. By then I was married and living in Seattle. I was visiting him in Florida. He took me to lunch and asked, “When are you going to start writing again?” I don’t think he knew about the squirrel stories, but had always been proud of the newspaper ones. I shrugged and said I didn’t know if I could write anymore. My writing was all bureaucratic now.

He said, quite simply, “You’ll write when you’re ready.”

We lost him in March of the following year. It was almost exactly a year after his death that I was awakened from a deep sleep, as sure as if someone had shaken me, and a phrase was in my head: A snow path to Dingle. A snow path to Dingle – a phrase so strong and nonsensical, it had to come from somewhere, for some reason, and it refused to leave. Hardly having any choice, I resolved to do some research to discover its meaning.

And, because I already loved historical fiction, and had twice visited Dingle in the west of Ireland to explore our family’s Irish heritage, I felt I had a basic foundation and a clear place to start. And so I was off…on a real adventure.

Secrets of a Guided Meditation

Years ago I attended a spiritual retreat on a Thanksgiving weekend, and experienced my first guided meditation. The guide was a woman I knew and trusted, so it made the trip easier for a skeptic like me. And, her voice was as confident as it was soothing. She had more than a hundred listeners captivated. It was the “secret garden” meditation that invites the listener to imagine a peaceful and beautiful place all their own where they can fully relax.

It was a powerful experience for me — I never knew I had a secret garden but sure enough she led me to it, and I have used it for years to escape stress or grief. But I also found other uses from the experience. The techniques apply as well to storytelling. I think the secrets to a successful meditation are these:

1. Reduce the barriers. My existing trust meant a major barrier for me already was down, but my friend’s voice was calming, and she walked us through a relaxation procedure that helped level the walls even further.

2. Take the audience where they already want to go. Who doesn’t want to go to a secret garden? But there might be other things we want, too, like a health for ourselves or others, or release from fear or anger.

3. Promise a reward. At the secret garden we would find peace. At the end of the meditation, my friend said, we would feel lighter, and might open our minds to unexpected visions. If you found yourself going down a negative path, stop and begin again. You are in control.

My friend took the meditation a step further and had us meet ourselves, we as adults meeting the small child that we once were. What did the child look like? What might she say? How would we feel about that child? It was a remarkable experience for those who gave in to it. I remembered the child I saw well enough to paint a watercolor of her later.

I drew on this experience when writing chapter 21, “Army of Souls,” in Sharavogue. This is when the healer leads the slaves through a meditation to heal the fevered protagonist. Together they visit the palace of the feared witch Mabouya who has captured the girl and keeps her sick so that she, Mabouya, will not be alone. In Mabouya’s arms the girl has become an infant. The slaves want to rescue the child from the evil Mabouya. Through the shared vision, the slaves become the army of souls to steal the child away and restore her to the physical world. Success in outsmarting Mabouya is their reward. And Mabouya was real and feared by the slaves of Montserrat in the 1650s, so the story is grounded in truth.

It is a hypnosis of sorts, and a great success if a writer can lull readers enough to forget the physical world if only for a few minutes and go with the flow of a story. For me it’s a reminder of how our personal experiences can enrich the detail of writing, and at the same time allow the author to relive a profound point in time.

St. Patrick’s in Montserrat

An image from a recent St. Pat’s celebration on the island

On the tiny, volcanic island of Montserrat, St. Patrick’s Day gets a full week of celebration with festive feasting, fishing, hiking and lots of music. There’s a Goat Water Sale commemorating the traditional stew made with goat meat, and a “slave feast” recalling the island’s history of sugar and tobacco plantations worked by slaves.

Sometimes people are shocked to learn that the Irish who came to Montserrat in the mid-17th century actually owned slaves. Why would they who had been enslaved and treated live vermin by the English condone slavery in their own plantations? Those who were lucky enough to find land there that did not already belong to the English were eager to work it, but they quickly learned that because there was so much work to be done and most of it by hand, there was no way to operate at a profit without free labor.

A 1995 white paper by William E. West chronicles what happened to the Irish during that period:

In 1641, Irelands population was 1,466,000 and in 1652, 616,000. According to Sir William Petty, 850,000 were wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship and banishment during the Confederation War 1641-1652. At the end of the war, vast numbers of Irish men, women and children were forcibly transported to the American colonies by the English government.7 These people were rounded up like cattle, and, as Prendergast reports on Thurloes State Papers8 Pub. London, 1742, “In clearing the ground for the adventurers and soldiers the English capitalists of that day… To be transported to Barbados and the English plantations in America. It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians … a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls… To solace them.”9

The book Sugar and Slaves by Richard S. Dunn covers the story in vivid detail and informed much of my research for Sharavogue. Another book, If the Irish Ran the World, details the Irish experience with slavery.

Truly it was a bad time for both the Irish and the Africans. After such pain and turmoil, it is a great recommendation of the human spirit that the people of Montserrat have found a brilliant way on St. Pat’s Day to combine and celebrate the cultures that collided there and now have melded together.

More about the celebration here…

Fiction as archaeology

I came across an interesting documentary on archeologists recently. The premise was that if they were fortunate enough through their work to discover something very ancient, one could not only understand more about his or her ancestors, but feel a spiritual connection to them, and perhaps even a spiritual connection to God. It reminded me of a trip I took several years ago to St. Kitts, trying to learn about the sugar plantations that developed there in the 17th century. This would help me describe the fictional one I was creating, called Sharavogue.

St. Kitts, West Indies

Before the trip, I happened to go with several girlfriends to see a Tarot card reader. It was all in fun, but the reader was quite good. When it came to my turn, she asked where I was going on an upcoming a trip, and I told her. As she looked at my cards, she said that while I was there the veil between the physical world and the spiritual world would become very thin, and I would experience something profound. She could not tell me more, but simply said I should be open to whatever might come to me. I did not put much weight in her prediction at the time. It wasn’t until I returned that I was able to connect the dots.

I was traveling alone and arrived in St. Kitts to balmy weather, but the next day it turned stormy with heavy rain. Being from Seattle I tried to ignore the rain and go about my business. I drove about the island and visited a couple of historic sites, collecting information and experiences. I began to feel a little uneasy and wrote it off to the fact I was alone in an unfamiliar place. But the feeling continued to grow, such that my stomach grew tight, my appetite diminished. I tried to record my notes on my laptop but couldn’t focus and eventually gave up. That night I could not sleep, but tossed and turned as the feeling of unease grew.

Within an hour of waking I received a call from the clerk of the hotel where I was staying. My husband was trying to reach me from Seattle. My mother was ill and had been taken to the hospital emergency room. I had to get back home.

I did, and my mother improved over the next few days and was able to return home also. It took longer for my paranoia to diminish. I spoke with the Tarot reader again and she suggested that I had once lived in St. Kitts, probably as a slave, and through her illness my mother had removed me from danger as she probably had once before. We had acted out some kind of karmic connection. Whether you believe in past lives or not, the idea is still interesting to think about.

I really don’t know, but I have to say that when writing about my character Elvy Burke, there were times when her story came to me so powerfully and vividly I had wondered. What if there really had been a woman like her, and what if she was speaking to me through the conduit of my imagination? What kind of connection could she and I have, if not through blood and spirit? The idea made writing thrilling and somehow more important.

I will never know if there is truth to any of this, but as another character who transcended fiction used to say, “Fascinating!”

A King’s Demise

Bust of King Charles I in the British Museum, London

Three hundred and sixty-four years ago this month, England’s King Charles I was beheaded by direction of Parliament, with General Oliver Cromwell leading the formalities. King Charles was charged with treason, having just lost a bloody civil war and continuing to plot with is pesky royalist friends.

Charles I was considered a bad king. He signed away business monopolies to his favorites without regard to the consequences, taxed greedily and without consent of Parliament, and spent lavishly on his grand art collection. He thought he had the right: the God-given King’s Prerogative, to which Parliament did not subscribe. Plus, his wife was Catholic when the country most definitely had gone Protestant and Puritan.

In her book, Rebels and Traitors, Lindsey Davis does a nice job of describing the dramatic scene:

The King knelt before the block. He spoke a few words to himself, with his eyes uplifted. Stooping down, he laid his head upon the block, with the executioner again tidying his hair. Thinking the man was about to strike, Charles warned, ‘Stay for the sign!’

‘Yes, I will,’ returned the executioner, still patient. ‘And it please Your Majesty.’

There was a short pause. The King stretched out his hands. With one blow of the axe the executioner cut off the King’s head.

The assistant held up the head by its hair, show the people, exclaiming the traditional words: ‘Here is the head of a traitor!’ The body was hurriedly removed and laid in a velvet-lined coffin indoors. As was normal at executions, the public were allowed to aproach the scaffold and, on paying a fee, to soak handkerchiefs in the dripping blood, either as trophies of their enemy, or in superstition that the King’s blood would heal illness.

Kings had been killed before, of course, but most typically in battle by an opposing army, or they were murdered by some ursurper using a blade or a poison. But this was the first time a nation’s government had executed a king. Would God allow that? Apparently so, and it sent a shockwave throughout Europe’s monarchies.

It also freed Oliver Cromwell to begin the episode for which he is most hated and remembered — especially by the Irish. A rebellion against the English plantation of Ireland had begun eight years earlier. With the civil war won and the king dead, Cromwell was now free to descend with Parliament’s army upon Ireland to crush the rebels. And that he did. This is where the term “decimated” comes from: It refers to Cromwell’s order for his soldiers to execute every 10th Irish rebel, and the rest were shipped to the West Indies to work as slaves or die. This is where my story begins, in Sharavogue.

17th Century Grinches

I was just wondering today (a little behind everyone else, it appears) what a 17th century Christmas really was like. In the time of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans enjoyed a lot of power in Parliament, and it turns out they actually canceled Christmas by ordinance in 1652: no holiday, no mince pies, no decorations, no church services. If only they’d had Dr. Seuss to remind them that Christmas happens anyway, even if you take away the gifts and the trappings.

Since Christmas Day really isn’t the day of Christ’s birth — the day was conscripted for Christmas because it was already a pagan celebration day and it was easier to turn more pagans to Christianity if they still got to party on their favorite day — the Puritans claimed the day had no basis in the Bible and therefore should be banned. A great description of this episode in history is covered by another blogger, TrickyGirl, who includes a recipe for mince pie: Another Kind of Mind.

The topic also was covered a few days ago by Rachel Schnepper for the New York Times: The Puritan War on Christmas.

Bust of Cromwell from the Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon.

The Puritan leader of the time and uncrowned King of England Oliver Cromwell gets blamed for a lot of things (he’s the bad guy in my novel Sharavogue, for instance), but the Cromwell Association says we should not blame The Lord Protector for the ban on Christmas:

“There is no sign that Cromwell personally played a particularly large or prominent role in formulating or advancing the various pieces of legislation and other documents which restricted the celebration of Christmas, though from what we know of his faith and beliefs it is likely that he was sympathetic towards and supported such measures, and as Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death in September 1658 he supported the enforcement of the existing measures.”

Still, there was much joy among the English people when Christmas was restored along with the monarchy and King Charles II.

The Puritan ban on Christmas was big for the New England colonies, but eventually the drive for religious freedom made Christmas a major holiday in our nation. Now, of course, we have so much religious freedom that Christmas again suffers a ban of sorts: If U.S. government agencies will display signs of the Christian holiday, they must also display the symbols of every other religion, including atheism. The irony is that in some cases these agencies just put an unadorned fir tree on display, and presto, we are right back to pagan symbolism!

 

Assassins, Miles Sindercombe, and fiddling things

Miles Sindercombe was a fascinating surprise to me as I researched my book, Sharavogue. I was looking for any assassination attempts on the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17th Century, because my protatonist would be attempting to do exactly that. Being American, I had never heard of Sindercombe, so I wonder if he is better known in the UK. He tried twice and failed to kill this uncrowned king.

Wikipedia gives a pretty good history of assassination that’s worth the read, tracing it back to 1080 and the Order of Assassins founded around the time of the Crusades. In Cromwell’s case the attempt must have come as no surprise, at least to his security crew, considering Cromwell had won a bloody civil war and then beheaded the king, Charles I. He also had led a brutal march across Ireland to put down a rebellion. The man did not lack for enemies and controversy over him continues to this day.

What’s interesting is that Sindercombe seems to be an unlikely and tragic figure. I was unable to turn up an illustration of him, but it seems he was a thin, mild-mannered sort who went by the name of “Fish.” A former soldier, apprentice to a surgeon, he aligned with others he met in taverns (i.e. Edward Sexby) who had fought against the Royalists but had fallen out with Cromwell’s policies.

The first plan against Cromwell was to shoot up his carriage as it slowed to go through a narrow pass on the way to Hampton Court. But, Cromwell decided to go by boat so the plot failed. The second attempt was to shoot Cromwell from the window above the side exit from Westminster Abbey where Cromwell would pass after hearing a sermon. But Crowell was surrounded by crowds, they could not get a good shot, and the plot was discovered. Sindercombe and his accomplices were arrested. Sexby was questioned by Cromwell himself, was sent to prison and soon died of a fever. He was the lucky one. Sindercombe was sentenced to a traitor’s death (the whole hideous bit, with the hanging, disembowelling while still alive, and body parts on pikes for display). To help him avoid this, friends sent him letters coated with arsenic which he rubbed on his face and neck, poisoning himself to death the night before his planned execution. His body was buried beneath the highway where no one could mourn him.

Cromwell made light of the whole thing, calling such attemps on his life “little fiddling things,” so as not to encourage the Royalist-spread rumor that he so feared assassination he was drinking himself to death. My recent visit to the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon confirms the rumor of his fear, if not the drinking. A display shows an inlaid cabinet of perfumes, ointments and soaps–a gift from the Grand Duke of Tuscany–that he never used, most likely fearing a poison. Cromwell’s doctor is quoted as saying “He is possibly afraid that they will be bitter, being fearful of his own shadow, so to speak, and living in constant apprehension of everything for he trusts no one.”

History has Cromwell dying of natural causes in 1658, but after his death his own doctor, secretly (or suddenly?) a Royalist, was rumored to have poisoned him in favor of the return to monarchy.

Following the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was not so fortunate. His life is revisited in the new movie, Lincoln, just out this week, and his assassin John Wilkes Booth was hanged along with his accomplices. It is an unforgettable episode in our history, unfortunately repeated several times.

 

Tale of Two Cromwells

When I talk to people about the setting of my book Sharavogue, and mention the name Cromwell, I get confused looks: cognitive dissonance. Most people have heard of Cromwell, but I am writing about the 17th century, and the man they tend to think of by that name lived in the 16th century, serving the court of King Henry VIII. After Cardinal Woolsey fell from favor by failing to produce this king’s annulment from Queen Catherine of Aragon, his protege Thomas Cromwell took up the work. It was Thomas who orchestrated the marriage to Anne Boleyn, and who dissolved and destroyed the country’s monasteries and churches to fill the king’s coffers with their riches. By 1540, Thomas himself fell from favor and was executed for treason, though good Henry later regretted it.

More than a century later, Oliver Cromwell gained prominence through the Parliamentary army’s victory in the English civil war. And for anyone with a drop of Irish blood in their veins, it is this Cromwell who makes that blood run cold. Oliver shook the foundations of Europe’s monarchies when he beheaded King Charles I for treason in 1649, and later became Lord Protector (rather than king) of the English Commonwealth. But between those two historic events, he marched his army across Ireland to massacre the Irish people and crush a rebellion. If you’ve ever heard the term “decimation,” it comes directly from his practice of killing every tenth man among his captives, and shipping the rest to the West Indies to work until they died.

Cromwell, by Antonia Fraser, including my bookmarks and sticky notes

Ironically, Oliver Cromwell wasn’t really a Cromwell at all. He was a Williams. As Antonia Fraser deftly explains in her definitive biography, Cromwell, Oliver descended from Thomas Cromwell’s sister Katherine, who married Morgan Williams. Their son Richard adopted the “more celebrated” Cromwell name and this continued to be used by Richard’s descendents. Apparently it was not uncommon during this time for families to adopt the name of a famous relative in hopes of benefitting from that prominence.

But wait, the ironies continue. The true descendents of Thomas Cromwell became Earls of Ardglass, and this family supported the Royalist side, opposing Parliament when Oliver led that army to victory.  And though Richard Williams took the name Cromwell as a means to elevate his family, eventually it backfired as the two Cromwells became one in the modern mindset, and in addition to the brutal killings in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell also takes the blame for the hated archtectural destruction perpetrated by Thomas.

Oliver does retain his fan base, however. Though hated for his violence and brutality in Ireland and his Puritan oppression of the English court, he is revered by some for his military prowess and for introducing the idea of a commonwealth for England.

Live on Kindle!

Sharavogue went live on Kindle today and I feel like I was just awarded my PhD! Isn’t that funny? A decade of research, writing, reviewing, rewriting and so forth, I guess it is fairly similar! Had I any idea the amount of work that goes into a novel I would have taking up knitting instead, I think! But a lot of passion goes into it also. I’m not sure how many people are passionate about knitting — a whole industry exists for it so I guess there are quite a number. Each to his or her own! My author friends will agree, the writing passion will not be denied.

Anyway, for me this is a kind of ending even as it is a new beginning. Perhaps it is ironic that “Sharavogue” comes from the Irish meaning “bitter place” — I had many bittersweet times with this work. At times I could not stay away from it, and at other times I swore to never write again (sound familiar, anyone?). I am ready to share Sharavogue with my friends and readers, and will be doing some promotions around it just to get it “out there” a bit, but also will be deciding what comes next for me. Just as this story chose me (woke me up out of a dead sleep!), I suspect there is something in store I have not yet dreamed of.

Enormous thanks to all of you who supported me over the years as I worked on this book. After all that time, during my final proofing I found that I still love the story very much. I hope you’ll love it too.