And back to some questions

attribution glassandmirror

In the continuing, I-will-answer-stuff mode, let me pull up a few more questions and, like, answer them.

These questions are about the Spymaster fictive universe.

The next lot of questions will be about Forbidden Rose, but I want to wait a while until some folks have read it.

17) Do you have a formal background in history?

I'll confess.  I never took a course in history after the obligatory American History class in Ninth Grade.  Not one course.

But I love history.  I read history textbooks for fun.  I have a whole shelf of memoirs and diaries.  They're stacked up there like potato chips, just waiting for me to grab a few.  

 

18)  How much of the Spymaster story is historical fact?

Some.

The actual historical background is as correct as I can make it.

The story is wholly fiction, and I got huge big chunks constructed out of whole cloth --the British Intelligence Service and the Albion Plans.

The British Service.

There was no historical spy organization called the British Intelligence Service in the early Nineteenth Century.  Was there an organized civilian intelligence organization at all?

The British Military had intelligence arms.  There's plenty of information on this.  When I refer to 'Military Intelligence' I'm on fairly solid ground.

And the civilian side?  There are just profusions of period references to English spies operating in England and France, obviously not part of the military. 

We know the British government would have had in front of them the unfortunate outfoxing they received at the hands of George Washington's organization.  They'd have the example of the other European powers -- France, Russia, the Hapsburg Empire, etc. -- with their highly organized and structure secret police.  The idea of an organized secret service was not the rocket science of the period.  If nowhere else, the British would have learned the value of spy organizations from Walsingham, two centuries before.

So when we ask ourselves whether the British would have created a civilian intelligence service . . . taking a line from Mythbusters, I'd call this plausible. 

Why do we not have copious evidence of this? 

The British public -- from the lowliest street sweeper to the nobility --  was utterly opposed to the existence of any sort of 'secret police'.

The whole idea was repugnant and associated with the worst excesses of European tyranny.  Regency London didn't even have an ordinary metropolitan police force, something that had been a commonplace in Paris for two generations, because the British saw this as an infringement on personal freedom.  A secret service, it was thought, was the first step to stripping Englishment of their ancient liberties.

To which I say, "Good for you, you stubborn Englishmen."

Anyway.  A civilian intelligence force was not a popular notion.  Any such service would have kept itself well hidden from the public.  When the Napoleonic War ended, I could easily see all records being destroyed.

The farther off from England the nearer is to France

The Albion Plans
(from Spymaster's Lady)

We know Napoleon built a flotilla of boats at Boulogne for the invasion of England.  We know he turned back from this scheme at the last minute. The fleet never sailed.

Nobody knows why.

Was a grand, detailed plan of the invasion drawn up, with supply routes and battle maps, cost estimates, dates and objectives?

I honestly don't see why there couldn't have been.

   

19)  Where did you learn about spies?

We know a good bit about British government spies in this time period.  

Elizabeth Sparrow's exhaustive Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792 - 1815.

Maffeo's Most Secret and Confidential: Intelligence in the Age of Nelson. 

Michael Durey, William Wickham, Master Spy: The Secret War Against the French Revolution.
Michael Durey, The British Secret Service and the escape of Sir Sidney from Paris 1798, History, July 1999, n° 275.

Richard Deacon's History of the British Secret Service.
Elizabeth Sparrow, The Alien Office, 1792-1806, The Historical Journal, vol. 33, no. 2 (1990) 

Richard Gover's Britain at Bay, Defense against Bonaparte 1803 - 1814. 
Alexander Rose's Washington's Spies: Story of America's First Spy Ring.
David Hollins,  The Hidden Hand: Espionage and Napoleon, Osprey Military Journal Issue 2.2, Osprey Publishing (December 30, 2002).
Robert Johnson, Spying for the Empire: The Great Game in Central and South Asia, 1757 to 1947.
Tom Pocock, The Terror Before Trafalgar: Nelson, Napoleon and the Secret War.
Clive Emsley, The Home Office and Its Sources of Information and Investigation, 1791 to 1801, Eng. Hist. Rev., xciv (1979).
Christopher John Gibbs, Friends and Enemies: The Underground War Between Great Britain and France, 1793-1802.  Here.  Here.
Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution; The United Irishmen and France.
Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790-1988.


Oh ... and this is not so much germane, but an interesting speculation here about Benjamin Franklin.

Interested in the forerunners of my Meeks Street gang?

Stephen Budiansky. Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Waksingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage.

And moving into the 1830s for those who want to cast a decade or so past the era of my stories,

Stephen Wade, Spires in the Empire: Victorian Military Intelligence.
C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780 to 1870.
     

20) Did it take a tremendous amount of research?

I probably should say something modest like -- 'Oh, well.  This is something I just threw together from what I had in the refrigerator.'

But actually, I work like a dog doing the research.

It never ends.  

The JUSTINE story will be the

Actual example of a dog similar to what I work like

fifth book set in the same general time period  and I'm still up to my gills in Historical Stuff I Don't Know Anything About.