Plot Against Pepys (eBook)

Ben Long, James Long (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
336 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-29098-7 (ISBN)

Infos

It is 1679 and England is awash with suspicion. Fear of conspiracy and religious terrorism has provoked panic in politicians and a zealous reaction from the legal system. Everywhere - or so it is feared - Catholic agents are plotting to overthrow the king. Now Samuel Pepys, Secretary of the Admiralty, finds himself in a position few people then or now would have expected - charged with treason. Imprisoned in the Tower of London and abandoned by the embattled king, Pepys knows that time is running out before his show trial and execution. So, with customary brilliance, he sets to work investigating his mysterious accuser, Colonel John Scott, and uncovers a life riddled with ambition, forgery, treason and - ultimately - murder. Using rare access to Pepys' own account of the affair, James Long and Ben Long brilliantly evoke a turbulent period in England's history - and tell the forgotten story of the two most dangerous years in the life of the legendary diarist.

James Long and Ben Long are father and son. James graduated from Oxford with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He has written eleven novels, several of which are based on historical fact. He also writes as Will Davenport. Ben graduated from the University of Bristol in 2003 with a history degree. He has directed several plays and written one, which has been performed on both sides of the Atlantic. This is his first book.

Rezensionen

The meticulousness of the Longs' research is awesome, right down to the contemporary weather reports that allow them to paint the sky the right colours for the specific days on which key events happened. Their storytelling prowess is sufficient to guide the reader through a historical labyrinth with a had that is firm, if not quite gripping ... The great achievement of The Plot Against Pepys is not so much biographical as archaeological. The authors pick through the fragments of one man's broken crockery, buried under a heap of historical rubble, and reconstruct an era. Digging and dusting around Pepys's predicament, they expose the foundations of modern English politics.

The book is packed with marvellouse asides that add colour to an already kaleidoscopic cavalcade of crass credulousness, court drama and crookery ... I couldn't put it down, and there aren't many books on the seventeenth century you can say that about.

The Longs are adept at painting the English in the grip of mass delusion, and they have a remarkable leading man who brings all his mental acuity to bear on the clearing of his name. We don't have the diarist's first-hand account of these events, but, thanks to the Longs, we can imagine what the great man went through.

Pepys left his papers in excellent order, and it is primarily these that James and Ben Long have brilliantly researched ... fascinating detective work in the footsteps of Pepys. It is history, rather than a holiday thriller, but it is every bit as enjoyable.

Describes in intricate detail how such an apparently proposterous situation came about and shows us a side of Pepys that is little know to the general public ... Written as a thriller against a background of an age in religious turmoil, this is one of those books that brings an entire period to vivid and pulsating life.

Entertaining

The father an son James and Ben Long have combined their separate skills of novelist and historian to produce an exciting, informative, at times amusing and always readable tale from one of the darkest episodes in English history ... they stay close to their well-researched sources and paint enough of the background to create a narrative that onvinces as well as grips ... For spy story addicts this is a great tale. Imagination could hardly conjure up such a pack of dodgy-dealing double and treble agents as appear on both sides of this story ... The PLot Agaist Pepys has its universal point, not to be forgotten in troubled times ... there is enough about the white-hot politics of the period to make the reader want to learn more. Indeed, if we want to interest the oung in history, The Plot Against Pepys would be no bad place to start. It is great fun to immerse oneself in such wickedness, even better to find that virtue triumphs after all. If you tried to put it into a novel, you would lose credibility - but this tale is tru. At its heart, this story of plots and counter plots contains obvious echoes to our own times. One of the main lessons that the nation could draw from thePopish Plot was that mixing religion and politics is potentially explosive, and calls for much restarint if political frenzy is to be avoided and civil liberties and human rights are to survive.

The authors of this lively ... account have set out to tell the story of Pepys's dangerous later years with somehthing of that rich detail which we find in the diary. They have researched diligently in the great mass of papers that Pepys left behind ... Their delving in the records has been tireless and fruitful.

innovative ... through a combination of hindsight and thoroough research, the Longs have pieced together a story that Pepys, its protagonist, could only partially grasp. In its complex twists, coincides and villainies, set against a backdrop of politico-religious events, their narrative is as compelling as any work of fiction and stranger than most. That every detail - from dialogue to the weather - is teased from a documentary source attests to the authors' meticulousness and integrity ... the Longs' detective work will grip all manner of non-specialist readers. This is a fascinating snapshot in history, and a thumping good yarn.

Interesting ... meticulous ... The modern biographer has the problem of seeiming either excessively speculative or entirely unnecessary. The problem was overcome in splendid style a couple of years ago by Claire TOmalin in her full-dres life. The Longs, father and son, have solved the problem in a different but just as effective way ... The Longs have discovered and spelt out a terrifying corner of English history ... this terrifying tale continues to carry baleful warnings in our own age of suspicion and interrogated loyalties.

A historical investigation that has all the vigour and panache of superior detective fiction ... James and Ben Long have illuminated a murky episode of British political history.

For a timely reminder of the with-hunts we are capable of, their book is hard to beat.

This father and sone team have produced a cracking historical yarn. They certainly know their stuff ... Anyone interested in this period of English history will find, like me, that it is a thoroughly good and intriguing read.

James and Ben Long's fascinating new book ... One of the virtues of this book is that James and Ben Long are always aware of the larger politial background ... This story, so well told here, is of course not new ... The Long's, a father-and-son team, have worked industriously through most of the manuscripts, and are able to add many points of detail. But this is not just a book for Pepys buffs. It is a work to be enjoyed both as a powerful detective story, and as a fascinating entree into the paranoid-populist world of politics in late 17th-century England.

This crisis and Pepys's determined attempts to clear his name are adroitly described by father and son James and Ben Long. They let the drama speak for itself, and Pepys's fortitude too as the diarist found himself cast as the victim in a thriller.

Fascinating study. The Long's skillfully unravel the intriguing story. The Longs give a stirring account ... the authors follow every twist and turn, they are not swamped by the material and maintain an elegant tone ... above all the Longs have an eye for the telling detail which is worthy of the great diarist himself.

Textauszug

2

Toys for King Louis

In May 1660, nineteen years before Samuel Pepys’s imprisonment in the Tower of London, Charles Stuart came down in triumph to the beach at The Hague. After nine years as an exile on the Continent he was preparing to sail for England and sit as king on the throne that had been denied him. The white sands of the Dutch coast were black with the people who came to watch his departure. When the King’s presence on the shore was made known to the English fleet waiting to collect him, its commander fired his ship’s guns. The rhythmic explosions of the salute fell out of time as the fleet joined in, a disordered cacophony of celebration.1 Pepys, who at that time was a young clerk, was on board one of the ships by virtue of his family links to Edward Montagu who commanded the fleet sent to bring Charles home. Pepys fired one of the guns himself, but leaned too far over, and the flash from the touchhole hurt his right eye.2 All day the guns fired; England had a king again.

When Pepys woke the next morning, his eye was red and sore but his spirits were high, for a new age was being born. Everywhere the old regime was coming to an end. The ships’ crews had been busy painting the royal coat of arms over the Commonwealth harp, and the King and his brother, the Duke of York, set to at a table on the Naseby’s quarterdeck to make changes. Having no wish to travel back to England in a ship named after the Cromwellian Civil War victory which finished his father, Charles renamed her the Royal Charles, while the Richard, accompanying her, became the Royal James. On deck Pepys watched as ‘we weighed anchor, and with a fresh gale and most happy weather we set sail for England’.3

He set these events down in a book he had bought at the end of the previous year. Its pages were white, and he had ruled neat red margins on to them. On 1 January he had begun his record. It was the diary of a poor man at the beginning of his career.

As the wind filled the sails to return the fleet and its precious royal cargo to England, a series of little events marked the turn in the fortunes of Samuel Pepys. First, he discovered that he quite liked the new king. Pepys had been sufficiently republican to watch the execution of Charles I with interest, but there was a note of admiration in his description of the dead king’s son. ‘All the afternoon,’ he observed, ‘the King walked here and there, up and down (quite contrary to what I thought him to have been) very active and stirring.’ Industrious Pepys admired the display of energy. The King could also tell a good story, relating what happened to him after the battle that drove him abroad.

Upon the quarterdeck he fell into discourse of his escape from Worcester, where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through, as his travelling four days and three nights on foot, every step up to his knees in dirt, with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on, and a pair of country shoes, that made him so sore all over his feet, that he could scarce stir.4

In the years to come, Pepys was to hear this many times as Charles told it to courtiers at every opportunity. On that quarterdeck at that moment though, he was privy to the first telling of the most exciting adventure in the life of the most famous Englishman. It would be the talk of the alehouses the length and breadth of the country, a poignant tale with the happiest of endings.

Charles’s dog defecated in the boat, to Pepys and his companions’ huge delight. A king, Pepys concluded privately, is just as others are. The discovery was both mundane and momentous. At the heart of royal power there was a human being – fallible, powerful and accessible; Pepys was in the right place at the right time. As the fleet approached the English shore, he went to Charles’s royal brother James, Duke of York, about some business, and the Duke delighted Pepys by showing that he already knew his name. Pepys plucked up the courage to ingratiate himself and the Duke’s response was encouraging. In his diary that night the little clerk recorded the moment with typical brevity; the Duke, wrote Pepys, ‘upon my desire did promise me his future favour’.5 When the fleet completed its Channel crossing, great crowds greeted the royal brothers at Dover. ‘The shouting and joy expressed by all is past imagination,’ wrote Pepys.6 Four days later, on 29 May, King Charles II entered London and the old city – Shakespeare’s London, a city of tightly packed timber-framed houses whose upper levels still reached out over the streets and shrank the sky – welcomed him and his brother with celebration and open arms.

For his part in the Restoration, Pepys’s patron Montagu was made Earl of Sandwich. Sharing Montagu’s good fortune, Pepys was helped to the post of Clerk of the Acts – an administrative post with secretarial duties – in the Navy Office later that summer. It was a lucrative job. The Navy Office ran the supply side of the navy, providing it with men, materials and ships. Pepys was officially the most junior of the four officials in charge of it and his Diary shows that his enthusiasm was initially for the comforts of his new life.7 The navy was disorganised and run on a hand-to-mouth basis. The new Clerk of the Acts did his job well enough but no better.

His life changed at the beginning of 1662 when new instructions from the Duke of York as Lord High Admiral arrived at the Navy Office. Pepys recognised in them the Duke’s determined appetite for reform. He saw that he would do well to follow that lead and began to employ a vigorous precision in his work. As he wrote in his Diary the next day: ‘and so to the office, where I begin to be exact in my duty there and exacting my privileges – and shall continue to do so.’8 From then, he had an increasingly high regard for the Duke as a clear-sighted champion of proper resourcing for the beleaguered, cash-strapped navy. The Duke was a stiffer and less intelligent man than his subtle brother, the King, but he was an expert on this subject. The favour that he had promised Pepys on the ship came naturally. Pepys and the Duke stood together against frequent outbursts of obstruction, suspicion and criticism from the House of Commons and Pepys became the Duke’s advocate and public protector in that forum. He was a man on the make, seizing the opportunities the job offered to raise his own status among his Navy Office colleagues and to swell his own income in the process.

Through the rest of the 1660s, as that first Diary was filled and succeeded by five slightly larger volumes, a million and a quarter words in Pepys’s neat shorthand tell the story of his increasing status and the growing royal dependency on his bureaucratic and presentational skills. In the foreground of the Diary stand the dramatic events of that decade, the Plague and the Great Fire, woven in with Pepys’s sharp observations on all around him and all within him – few diarists have been so honest about their own frailties and peccadilloes. He confessed everything on the page: his jealousy of his wife’s flirtations, his own extramarital sexual encounters and, memorably, one unsuccessful search for any woman in a ‘hot humour’ which ended with him going to bed alone to fantasise about the Queen.9 The Diary ended abruptly in sadness on 31 May 1669 when Pepys’s eye troubles persuaded him he would go blind if he continued to write. It was a low point in his private life. His passionate French wife Elizabeth had caught him in a compromising position with their maid. A deep frost had glazed their marriage. Far more sadness followed. Soon after the Diary ended, Pepys took Elizabeth to Paris, perhaps to restore their joy. On the way home she caught typhoid fever and died.

In 1674, five years after her death, Pepys was made Secretary to the Admiralty. Political events had removed James, Duke of York from the post of Lord High Admiral the previous year. James, unwilling to take the anti-Catholic Test Act oath, had been replaced by a weak ‘commission’ of fifteen men supposedly running the Admiralty, leaving King Charles effectively in charge. Pepys, whose idea this may have been, was able to use the situation to redefine the role of Secretary, gathering new powers to himself and keeping the Duke well informed on key naval matters.10 On 25 July of that year Pepys sent a letter to Anthony Deane, the man who was destined to accompany him on the grim journey from the House of Commons to the Tower. The letter instructed Deane to hurry up from Portsmouth ‘to receive the King’s commands touching the building of 2 yachts which the King of France desires to have built for him here’.11

Anthony Deane was a master shipwright, a status he had attained at the age of only twenty-six. He had designed a string of highly regarded ships and when he received Pepys’s letter he was at the peak of his profession. He and Pepys had first encountered each other shortly after Pepys had discovered his new zeal for naval order in 1662. Pepys had been on his way to dinner with a new navy commissioner, a man of a similar mind.* As they approached the Ship tavern in Lombard Street, they bumped into the captain of the Rosebush, which was meant to be on its way to Jamaica. This kind of disorder infected the navy, and Pepys and his companion were...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.2.2012
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie
• Schlagworte: conspiracy • Historical fiction, historical mystery, Stuart era England • Longman History Book of the Year, Samuel Johnson Prize • Mary Rose, HMS Gloucester, Shipwreck, royal navy, archaeology • Murder • Rebellion • rebellion, conspiracy, murder, religion • Religion • Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Great Fire of London • Tbe Black Baron, Tennille Dix • Time Travellers Guide, Ian Mortimer
• ISBN-10: 0-571-29098-1 / 0571290981
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-29098-7 / 9780571290987