NEW RELEASE - THE BORDEAUX CONNECTION

I am delighted to announce the release of my latest thriller. The Bordeaux Connection is now available to purchase from Amazon worldwide!

In Medieval England the defence of the realm in times of need rested on the shoulders of twelve men – a secret brotherhood of knights, who answered only to the ruler of England. They were called The White Hart.

As they are now…

When a series of explosions rock the Scottish capital, The White Hart is once again called into action. While the attackers flee Edinburgh with a hoard of priceless historical manuscripts, in a lonely village in England recent intelligence photographs suggest a potentially shocking connection between the suspected culprits and the wife of the Deputy Prime Minister…

For White Hart agents Mike Hansen and Kit Masterson, the new lead is just the first piece of a potentially explosive puzzle that threatens to tear a hole in the heart of government. As a new threat soon reveals itself, their only chance to bring to an end the recent chain of ruthless activities is to follow the trail to the bitter end. Right to the heart of its deadly conspiracy...

Part one of a brand new series…

UK customers can check out the book here for the introductory price of £0.99. US customers can do the same here for $1.49. 

NEW RELEASE: THE COOL BOX - SEVEN ICE-SHATTERING THRILLERS FROM SEVEN BEST-SELLING AUTHORS

Following on from the success of The Hot Box, I'm delighted to announce the release of a brand new box set titled, The Cool Box - seven ice-shattering thrillers from seven best-selling authors. The offer is for a limited time only, and among the seven is my latest thriller, The Bordeaux Connection, part one of a brand new series.

UK customers can download the book Here for the special price of £0.99. US customers can download it Here for $0.99.

Guest Blog by Darren Baker - The Long Reach of the Montforts

Darren at Lewes in East Sussex, the site of the Battle of Lewes in 1264,
in which Simon achieved a surprise victory over the
numerically-superior forces of Henry III, Prince Edward,
and Richard, Earl of Cornwall

Stopping by the Unknown Templar blogspot this week, I'm pleased to introduce biographer and writer Darren Baker, author of the well regarded newly released With All For All - A biography of Simon de Montfort. Darren's is the first biography of the enigmatic de Montfort since JR Maddicott's acclaimed work in 1996, and is already being celebrated as a much needed key addition to one of the most fascinating, yet understudied periods in England's history.

One of the more curious accounts of the English civil war of the 1260s comes from ‘The Templar of Tyre’, an anonymous section of the wider history known as Gestes des Chiprois. Although dealing principally with the crusader states through much of the thirteenth century, the author himself was not a member of the Templar Order. The title is a modern usage that reflects his service to the master of the Templars and, before that, to the wife of the lord of Tyre, John de Montfort. In all likelihood it was while working in the household of this Montfort family that the Templar got his information about the events leading up to and after Evesham.

Map of Tyre

John de Montfort was the son of Philip, whose father Guy was a brother of Simon de Montfort’s father. When Simon arrived in the Holy Land on crusade in 1240, Philip was already there. He had been born there sometime after 1204 when Guy, following the Fourth Crusade, married into the family of the local nobility. Philip’s connections and relations put him in a good position to promote his newly arrived cousin, the brother-in-law of the king of England and Holy Roman Emperor, to be the governor of the region in a bid to unite the warring Christian factions. Nothing came of the attempt and Simon soon returned to England, but Philip’s star rose until he was eventually made Lord of Tyre. Even though he was unable to stop the advancement of the Muslim Baibars, the sultan wasn’t taking any chances and had him assassinated in 1270 as he prayed in church, in a scene described by the Templar. He was succeeded by John, who ruled Tyre until his death in 1283.

Philip had a son from a previous marriage and life in France, who was also named Philip. Simon evidently knew and trusted him, for in 1259 he made him his deputy for Bigorre, a little county near the Pyrenees that came to him through his older brother, another Guy who, like their father Simon and uncle Guy, also died during the Albigensian Crusade. This Philip later became Charles of Anjou’s right-hand man as he went about conquering Sicily in 1265, the same year that saw Simon’s downfall and death at Evesham and the imprisonment of his fourth son, another Guy de Montfort. This Guy escaped the following year and had joined up with his second cousin Philip by the time of Charles’ victory at Alba in 1268. Two years later, when Charles talked his brother Louis IX of France into making Tunis the first stop of his latest crusade, ostensibly as part of Charles’ plan to create a Mediterranean Empire, Philip went along and died in the epidemic that also claimed Louis and other members of the French royal family. Charles, of course, survived.

Guy de Montfort

Guy de Montfort wasn’t there. Impressed by his skills, Charles had sent him to Tuscany to take command as his vicar-general. In 1271 Charles went to Viterbo, just north of Rome, in an attempt to break the deadlock over electing a new pope. Presumably he summoned Guy to meet him there. He arrived on 12 March with a large train of knights and discovered that Charles’ entourage included his English cousin Henry of Almain. The next day Guy found Henry in a church and slew him at the altar before dragging his body out onto the square and mutilating it in mock retribution for the disgraceful act preformed on his father’s body at Evesham. Guy was stripped of his lands and honours, did some time under house arrest, but was back fighting under Charles until he was captured near Sicily in 1287. He died in prison in 1291, twenty years after the murder and right around the time the Templar fled Acre as the Saracens conquered the remaining Christian strongholds in the Holy Land. He went to Cyprus and began his chronicle, the first known copy of which appeared in 1343.

Siege of Acre

The Templar’s account of the English civil war starts in 1265 by introducing Simon de Montfort as the earl of Gloucester. Mistakes like these abound, the result of the Templar recalling years later what he had overheard as events in the west were filtered into the household where he worked in Tyre. He does not mention that Simon was a relative of John’s, only that he was an ‘important man’ married to the sister of the king of England. His claim that Simon was reluctant to get involved in the reform movement, until forced to by Henry, of all people, seems to be his take on Montfort’s initial refusal to take the oath to abide by the Provisions of Oxford. It provides an opening for the Templar to cite Simon’s well-known determination afterwards to keep his oath at all costs, and to force the king to do likewise.

While Simon is described as a ‘worthy knight, bold and courageous’, the Templar claims he allowed himself to be taken in by Edward’s ruse with the banners and that led to his defeat. Edward’s escape is also treated with legendary status, suggesting that the Templar learned of these events from Edward’s men after they arrived in the Holy Land on crusade in 1271. Clearly these stories were put into circulation in the hope of bolstering the image of the man who had come to chop heads. Indeed, Edward would escape an assassination attempt as Philip de Montfort had not only the year before.

Henry, as usual, comes off the worst of the three. There’s no indication of his many endearing qualities, just a king who favoured foreigners, went back on his word, and got himself captured. The Templar makes him sound like his father John when he says the king ‘rounded up the rebels’ upon his release and had some of them killed, the others he let starve to death. Supposedly this took place in Salisbury, but why there nobody knows.         

By far the strangest episode related by the Templar deals with the murder of Henry of Almain. In his version of events, Simon is not killed at Evesham, only captured, and Edward asks Almain, his cousin like Guy’s, what he should do with him. Almain advises him to chop his head off, otherwise there will be no peace or an end to the conflict. To avoid the shame of killing him after he was captured, it should be made to look as if Simon fell in battle. So Edward waits until nightfall, chops Simon’s head off, and has his body flung onto the battlefield. Apparently the whole point here is to rationalise the killing of Henry of Almain. Perhaps the Templar did not know that he was in France at the time of Evesham, albeit contracting a marriage to the daughter of Simon’s mortal enemy, and that Guy killed him because he was the most convenient target yet available for the family’s vengeance. It is nevertheless interesting that Edward, despite whose counsel it was, should again be portrayed as sneaky. It would seem his well-deserved reputation for deviousness followed him wherever he went.

Henry of Almain

The Templar ends by describing Guy’s connections in Italy and how the pope absolved him of his deed. He mentions again that the two men were cousins, thus reiterating the intensely personal nature of the civil war. That was probably his intention all along in providing a narrative that he himself had to know was outlandish in some parts, like his statement that Henry of Almain was on his way to be crowned emperor of the Germans when Guy struck. Here was clearly an important saga unfolding in a part of the world only a handful of them might ever see, so it wasn’t necessarily important how it all happened, just that it happened at all.

However his account came to be embellished certainly takes nothing away from the Templar as an historian, particularly his eyewitness reports of the end of the crusader states. There may be, moreover, some place for his work yet in researching the years of the Montfortian struggle. Peter Edbury, whose translation of ‘The Templar of Tyre’ is used here, suggests it might be worthwhile in determining whether any of his erroneous claims turn up elsewhere. One has, at least, where the Templar says it was Simon, and not his son Henry de Montfort, who was out riding with Edward when he escaped. This same mistake was made by none other than Robert of Gloucester, whose particulars of the battle of Evesham are the ones most often cited today.

For more on Darren, you can visit his website www.simon2014.com or check out the book on Amazon UK and US

Family tree of the Royal Family of England and the de Montforts. The marriage between Simon and Henry III's younger sister, Eleanor, made Simon's relationship with the King frequently uncomfortable

                     

Cromwell and the Crown jewels - what really became of England's lost treasure?

As the dust settled on the English Civil War, the government of England found itself in an almost unimaginable situation. The killing of Charles I on a scaffold in Whitehall, though by no means the first example of a King of England meeting his end at the hands of his enemy, was unprecedented in the sense that he was the first king to be executed for treason. No less than three kings since the Norman Conquest – Edward II, Richard II, and Richard III – had met their maker in some way at the hands of their successor, but up to this point monarchy had always survived.

And prospered.

View across the battlefield of Edgehill - even today
it is soaked in atmosphere

With Charles I dead and his royalist accomplices jailed, fined or condemned to death, candidates to replace him on the throne were sorely limited. Whilst his daughter Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, remained in exile in The Hague after being ousted by the Spanish and the Catholic league, Charles’s heir and logical successor, his eldest son Charles Stuart, was planning his own military campaign against the Parliamentarians. Recently crowned Charles II of Scotland by his subjects in Edinburgh, his army headed south into England in 1650 and was abruptly dispatched by opposition forces in Worcester, forcing him to flee to the continent.

The Battle Obelisk at Naseby, the decisive
battle of the Civil War

Had Charles succeeded, England’s history might have been very different. Instead, as Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army swept away the last elements of dissent in Ireland and the Midlands, the wind of change that had already been blowing steadily throughout England for over a decade was ready to unleash its heaviest gale. The Rump Parliament, having already brought the king to trial in January 1649, wasted little time in launching a similar attack on the aristocracy and the institution of the monarchy. On 6 February the House of Lords was abolished after a vote in the House of Commons, and within a day a vote was cast to end the line of Stuart succession. From that moment forth England would no longer be ruled by any one person deemed of royal blood, but instead become a commonwealth: a government comprised of a forty-one-man council of state, with the prominent Cromwell sitting unrivalled as its chief citizen. Not as a king. But a politician.

The outcome of the Civil War will forever be remembered as a decisive moment in England’s history, and not just for the death of the king. Many of England’s mighty castles, trademarks of the lost dynasties, now lay in ruin, destined for destruction or decay, while the king’s personal possessions were commandeered, many finding a new home under the watchful eye of the new ruler. The symbol of the monarch, so long used to authenticate acts of Parliament, was removed from the great seal and as Cromwell’s forces took over the city of London, the coronation regalia that remained scattered within The Palace of Westminster, Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London were removed from the public eye. Documents from the time confirm the majority of the items were sold, and melted down.

Like the king and the institution they represented, the original crown jewels of England ceased to exist.

Edward the Confessor enthroned at Westminster
Abbey, as recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry

The idea that the Crown jewels of England could ever have been destroyed seems almost unthinkable. Anyone who has seen the present collection behind thick glass in the Jewel House of The Tower of London, watched over by the loyal Yeoman Warders, will undoubtedly acknowledge that there is something unique about them, as if their very appearance is inseparable from that of the monarch, including the kings and queens of the past. The term Crown jewels is itself worthy of further explanation. The term incorporates every item connected with the ceremony from metal to vestments, not merely the crown. Coronation regalia has always played a vital and, at times, dramatic part in England’s history. As recently as 1988, archaeologists discovered crowns from the 2nd century BC. Similar finds have also been recorded from the Saxon era.

William the Conqueror

William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066 culminated with his being crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey. The Bayeux Tapestry shows both Edward the Confessor and Harold Godwinson wearing a gold crown, and according to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, that records the history of Britain from around 60BC up until about 1154, William wore a crown on no less than three occasions a year. There are few, if any, surviving records of what exactly the Crown jewels consisted of at that time. Around 15 October 1216, just four days before his death, King John’s entire baggage train was wiped out by a tide in The Wash as he prepared to cross into Norfolk. There is a good deal of uncertainty about what precisely was lost. At his coronation at Gloucester Cathedral on 28 October, John’s son, Henry III, was crowned with a plain hoop of gold, property of Henry’s mother. The usual crown was apparently missing, though whether this was because it had been among the valuables washed away on the east coast or because the circumstances of the war made it inaccessible remains unclear. 

The first coronation of Henry III, from a window
at Gloucester Cathedral

In 1220, when Henry was crowned for a second time, the ceremony, attended by notably more prelates and barons than on the first occasion, was described in much more detail. Records of that event have identified the crown used on that occasion as the Diadem of Edward the Confessor. That this was the same one as used by Edward himself and later William the Conqueror and his successors is quite probable. An inventory of the Crown jewels by a monk at Westminster in the mid-1400s makes further reference to ‘an excellent golden crown’, along with other items apparently used at Edward the Confessor’s coronation, including ‘a tunicle…golden comb and spoon’, and for his wife, Edith, a crown, two rods, an onyx stone chalice and a paten. The spoon, along with the golden ampulla first used at the coronation of Henry IV to pour holy oil over the king, are two of the few pieces from the set that have survived.

King Alfred the Great with crown, from a statue
located in his home city of Winchester

Precise references to the diadem’s existence can be found from Henry III’s coronation right up to the reign of Charles I. To confuse matters, there has been some suggestion that the Diadem of Edward the Confessor was renamed King Alfred’s Crown at some point following the dissolution of the monasteries. Prior to that point another crown, referred to commonly as Alfred the Great’s state crown, is also recorded as having existed. Descriptions are vague, but appear different enough to confirm the existence of two crowns. An early description of King Alfred’s state crown referred to it being ‘set with slight stones and two little bells’, while a parliamentarian named Sir Henry Spelman writing during the civil war referred to Alfred’s crown as ‘of very ancient work, with flowers adorned with stones of somewhat plain setting’. One of the few surviving accounts of the diadem states it was a ‘gold crown decorated with diverse stones’. Cromwell’s agents are recorded as having found at least three crowns in Westminster Abbey, Whitehall Palace and the 14^th century Jewel Tower, whilst an inventory into the property of Edward II made reference to the existence of ten crowns.

The Jewel Tower - once part of the Palace of
Westminster

Among those might have been a series of rare finds from the reign of Edward I. In 1282, in preparation for his war against Edward I, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd deposited many of his jewels with the monks of Cymer Abbey. In 1284, with the war over, the jewels were handed over to Edward, including the ‘coronet Arthur’, a crown that supposedly belonged to the legendary king.

Later in Edward’s reign, the Stone of Destiny was brought from Scotland and kept in the Tower following the King’s victory over William Wallace in 1296. The stone was added to the coronation chair, but the appearance of the stone that now resides at Westminster Abbey does not fit with the original description.

Charles I alongside the Tudor State Crown

By the reign of Henry VII another crown, commonly referred to as the Tudor State Crown, had been added to the collection. Descriptions of this have survived in greater numbers, and it has also been shown in a number of portraits. The frame of this crown was also gold and embedded with pearls, rubies, sapphires and diamonds. It was decorated with a figure of the Virgin Mary, at least three crosses and as many as four fleurs-de-lis. The Tudor Crown was independently valued as the most precious of the original jewels at approximately £1,100, worth just under £2m in the present day.

A copy of St Edward's
Crown, apparently created
using gold from the
original diadem

Of the original items only the ampulla, the spoon, the coronation chair and possibly some of the swords have survived. It is believed that gold from the Diadem of St Edward may have have been used in the construction of the new St Edward’s Crown – the official coronation crown that has been used at most coronations since that of Charles II, including Elizabeth II. According to the official receipts, the remainder of the jewels were destroyed; however, during the civil war, a story told that one of the original crowns, possibly the diadem, had been salvaged by a band of Cavalier soldiers, its whereabouts never divulged. Is it possible one of the original jewels could still exist, waiting to be discovered?

The fate of the missing jewels is a central feature of The Cromwell Deception, available now from Amazon UK and US.

THE CROMWELL DECEPTION - OUT NOW