Every now and again, something comes along to remind us all of the continued importance of physical geography in our world — like, oh I don’t know, the Strait of Hormuz. Such basic geographic factors have always been of critical importance, particularly in the realm of international politics, and probably always will be. So too would they be in a constructed world, such as the one(s) you may yourself have invented, and as such understanding what those geographic factors mean is essential for understanding the international politics of your world.

Luckily, this is the precise intersection of things wot I know about, so in this article I’ll be combining my love of worldbuilding with my MA in international relationships to help you do just that, focusing on terrain, resource distribution, and the seas. I’ll also be providing examples from the real world, well known fictional ones, and even my own, the world which provides the backdrop for all my short stories released here on substack.

Against a Deterministic View

The first thing I want to briefly harp on about is that geography informs but does not determine the shape of international politics. It’s a factor, not the factor. Geography is the arena within which international politics plays out; it sets the bounds. But this is football, not the WWE — we’re not following a script, we’re merely acting within the constraints of those bounds.

So understanding geopolitics does not strip your polities1 and characters of agency and nor should the ideas I’m about to present be followed dogmatically. There are other factors that will carry weight in any world’s international politics, such as dominant cultural paradigms. Trying to understand the politics of medieval Europe without factoring in Christianity, for example, would be ridiculous.

And, in general, I do not believe any worldbuilding advice should be presented prescriptively, which is why I tend to limit mine to asking questions and raising ideas, rather than developing strict formulas. My only real guide is history and, if history tells us anything, it is that almost anything is possible with the right justification. Furthermore, as I’ve said previously, worldbuilding should be in service of storytelling, not vice versa. If you want a certain element in your international politics, construct your geography to allow it. So, keeping all that in mind, we can begin our geopolitical analyses.

Terrain

The primary physical element we want to look for in terrain is the existence or absence of physical barriers, in particular rivers, mountains, and forests. In any particular region, you want to know roughly how much is made up of obstructing terrain and how obstructive that terrain actually is (how wide the rivers, how high the mountains, how thick the forests). Roughly knowing the shape of these obstructions — how major rivers and mountain ranges snake across your map — will also be of critical importance. Once we know all that, we can begin the first stage of our analysis.

Obstructing terrain provides a natural barrier that is difficult to cross and easy to defend, making these barriers ‘natural’ borders, as well as merely being useful for demarcation. There is a reason that France, arguably Europe’s oldest state, is demarcated by the Pyrenees to the south-west, the Alps to the south-east, and the Rhine to the east, and that its historically most fluid border is the north-east one, which lacks a major river or mountain range in the area. Just by looking at France on a topographical map, you can already assume that most of its expansionist conflicts historically will have been for control of the low countries and the left bank of the Rhine.2

On the other hand, in areas that lack these barriers, such as open flatland, desert, and steppe regions, borders will naturally be more fluid, ebbing and flowing without anything to latch onto and calcify. That is, if borders are recognised at all. Such regions, devoid of anything to truly use for demarcation, may end up never really developing the concept of solid borders, and instead care more about the control of populations, resources, and specific settlements. Such fluidity in borders seems strange to us today, in a world that has reified borders to an extent without any historical parallel, but was more the norm than the exception historically in such regions.

This furthermore means that polities in more open regions are at greater risk of invasion. Those regions may see empires quickly rise but, without natural barriers to protect their own borders, those same empires could just as easily fall, either from invasion or from internal collapse. It is no coincidence that the Central Asian steppe has historically provided some of humanity’s fastest growing, and fastest collapsing, empires.

More barrier-laden regions will, therefore, trend in the opposite direction. Empires will be slower to conquer, borders will prove more stable, and polities will generally last longer due to a natural protection against invasion. Empires will find it difficult to expand and hold territory for another reason as well: communication and other logistical factors. Even once a barrier is conquered and moved over, it will continue to hamper logistics and communication, making the territory on the other side more difficult to control, and mountains and forests will provide safe havens for dissidents and rebels. Limitations in communication will also foster cultural differentiation.

At the extreme end of this, we have mountainous regions such as Switzerland and Afghanistan. Not only will these regions be difficult to conquer and retain control of, and therefore will trend towards independence from any major empires, but they are also likely to remain internally divided, each valley cut off from its neighbours. Expect loose confederacies or suzerain-tribute relationships with little centralised authority.

And, to go even beyond this extreme, we have archipelagoes3. With the barrier here not merely being rivers or mountains but the sea itself, these island networks are even more likely than mountain regions to maintain political independence while being strongly divided, with the added caveat that strong naval power, meaning control of the seas around the islands, will allow a polity to maintain control of communication and logistics between them. Able to isolate individual islands and completely control everything going on or off them, that naval power may be able to create a stable empire across them, with its control of the seas being its absolute lifeblood. (Thalassocracy is a technical term for this type of polity, though it applies beyond merely archipelagoes.)

Lastly, a note on forests. Forests are barriers of a much more permeable nature than rivers, mountains, and the seas themselves. Not only that, but they’re far more mutable too, in that forests can be removed from the map far more easily than those other features. That forests do not provide a clear line, unlike rivers, the coast, and some mountain ranges, also makes them inferior for border demarcation. And yet, more forested regions are more difficult to conquer and hold and are likely to divide settled populations. Just to give one example of this principle in action, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that over the course of the medieval and early modern era the relatively more forested Germany trended towards disunity while the relatively less forested France trended towards centralisation.

A memorable fantastical use of terrain as a natural barrier is Tolkien’s, using both a mountain range and a river to contain and constrain the evil of Mordor. One way that Tolkien cleverly plays with these dynamics is with his mountains which, by housing the dwarves, become not merely barriers, but centres of commerce and industry, connecting as well as dividing the land on either side of them.

Another I’d like to point out is Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse books, in which a magical barrier, difficult to cross, was semi-recently erected in a way that divides a nation in half. The resultant difficulty in travel and communication naturally makes it difficult to hold the state together and completely change its internal dynamics.

I’ve additionally made use of terrain as a barrier in my own stories. In the four stories I currently have on substack using a particular conflict between the states of Lydesis and Prolais as a backdrop (which can be read here, here, here, and also here), the Pyrnine mountain range between them is a major factor in limiting the Lydesi ability to press their advantage despite their overwhelming military superiority. That use of terrain as a force multiplier or minimiser is one I personally find really useful in my own worldbuilding.

Resource Distribution

The basic geopolitical dynamic when it comes to natural resources is obvious: polities want resources, and therefore want control over the areas with those resources. Ergo, resource rich regions are likely to be fought over more than other regions, or to themselves be the centre of major empires built off the back of those resources.

The first and most basic resource is food, which requires us to look at fertility across different regions. The most fertile regions will be heavily irrigated flatlands with either minimal or predictable flooding. Note that here we find overlap with our terrain analysis, as these most fertile regions have the added dynamics we’ve already analysed of flat land and rivers. Obvious real world regions that fit these criteria include Lower Egypt and Punjab, which have indeed historically been known as breadbaskets. (Which is to say, fertile regions able to export food to support populations in other areas.)

In worlds before modern agriculture, where famines would be all too common, control of these more famine-resistant regions, able to support other areas of an empire, are essential. Even outside of famine conditions, cheap and abundant food is a great way to promote political stability. And, if an empire wants to large city at its heart — heavily dependent on food imports — it will need breadbasket provinces to feed it. Egypt fulfilled this role both for Rome and, later, Constantinople, all the way up until its conquest by the Rashidun Caliphate.

On the other hand, we have regions that cannot support settled agriculture at all due to lack of irrigation and/or poor soil quality. Such areas will be the domain of migratory pastoralists, where control of land means control of grazing for the livestock that groups in the area rely on for their sustenance. Going even further, we have deserts, where any populations will gather at oases. With food in such regions being scarce, small changes in climate might force populations out of their home environments in search of the basic necessities, potentially prompting waves of settlement or invasion into more fertile regions.

And agriculture is not merely the domain of basic sustenance, but of luxuries and cash crops too. Particular prized crops may only grow in certain climates, requiring polities that wish to economically benefit from them to secure and maintain territory such climates, or to open up trade with such regions. They might also be particularly damaging to the soil, requiring constant expansion into new areas to maintain production levels. Sugar in the early modern era, for example, was a highly prized cash crop which was both labour intensive and very damaging to the environment, which were direct financial incentives for the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and imperial competition for new colonies in sugar growing climates. Other agricultural products might, in contrast, be difficult to introduce to new areas, incentivising competition for control of their traditional areas of production, such as wine and silk.

Besides agricultural products, what other resources are important to polities will depend on their economic needs and capabilities, as well as technology. What resources a given culture has access to will furthermore shape that technological development. Bronze, for example, was initially the preferred metal for early civilisations around the Mediterranean, as it doesn’t rust and, compared to early iron, was less brittle and easier to work with. However, it required a steady supply of tin, much of which came from far-off Britain, which was disrupted during the Bronze Age Collapse. In the aftermath, people turned to iron and, in the process, improved it and developed steel.

We see this kind of technological specialisation due to resource availability all over in our own history. For a fantasy example, we have Riftwar, in which two very different worlds are connected by a portal. One of those worlds looks a lot like medieval Europe, whereas the other has developed very different technology as they have very little metal and completely lack horses.

In the setting of my stories, the world is clearly split into an eastern and western hemisphere that were unaware of each other until a few centuries previously. The east, the setting of all my stories thus far, discovered new goods they were hitherto unaware of, like tobacco, tea, silk, paper, and gunpowder. They also found, however, that the west lacked horses, coffee, glass, cotton, and other staples of theirs. This led to very different technological developments and an explosion of trade and innovation after they established contact.

Seas and Coasts

And now we get into what is, for my money, the most important part: the very shape of the landmasses and seas around them.

The most efficient way to move goods about — and for much of history the quickest too — is via the water. In contrast, able to move under their own steam, people are generally most efficiently moved across land. Hence, routes of expansion, the movement of armies, tends to go overland, while routes of trade tends to go oversea, though of course these are only trends rather than hard-and-fast rules.

The result is that the seas are generally going to be the domain of trade and the highways connecting your polities for these purposes, with land routes only opted for when there’s no other choice (and, even then, trade will follow rivers where possible). And hence, the shape of the seas — the inverse of the shape of the coasts — will determine the shape of those highways.

This also means that areas with easy access to the seas and other trading regions will be able to trade regularly and grow more prosperous from it. Particularly in pre-Industrial worlds, the land is primarily going to be the domain of sustenance, with the seas being the engines of commerce and wealth. Large empires with little sea access might have large populations but still be relatively impoverished compared to smaller polities at the nexus of trade routes.

Looking at the seas between major polities and centres of trade, are there any chokepoints that all ships will have to pass through? This would most likely be straits, where the sea is a narrow strip bisecting land on either side, or peninsulas, which must be navigated around, where the most efficient route will force all ships onto a narrow path skirting the tip of the peninsula. These areas where shipping must concentrate will be the major vulnerabilities, limiting trade and allowing it to be controlled by nearby polities. Those polities might tax trade, or prey on it as pirates, or block it completely, giving them an outsized influence on global trade.

You might also have the inverse of a strait: an isthmus. Here, a narrow strip of land bisects the sea. If going around would take too long, the people here have two options. First, they might just unload their ships on one side of the isthmus, take the goods overland, and reload them on the other side. Otherwise, if they have the capacity to do so, they could build a canal through the isthmus, effectively turning it into a very narrow strait, completely in the power of whoever controls the canal. Suez and Panama are obviously the most notably examples of this principle in the modern world.

Having these features in your world allows for interesting naval geography and thereby international politics, creating areas of critical strategic value based on nothing other than the shape of their coastline. In particular because, while I’ve been focused on trade as the most common use of the seas, in worlds where polities make use of overseas conquest and colonisation, the movement of armies and supplies will also have to go through these oceanic highways. Controlling them will therefore be essential to keep such empires together, as controlling Gibraltar and Suez was to the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And, of course, you’ll also have to look at how any fantasy elements change these dynamics. Worlds will teleportation might be able to avoid sea-based transport entirely. In other worlds, travelling the seas might be more dangerous, forcing trade to stay local or go overland. This is true both of Sanderson’s Roshar setting, where regular and incredibly powerful storms make sea travel more difficult, and Jemisin’s setting for the Broken Earth books, in which the tectonic instability of the planet make tsunamis a more common occurrence. The existence of large sea monsters might have a similar impact.

By own fantasy setting lacks these overtly fantastical elements, but has those above mentioned features galore. Most of my stories take place in the Gulf Sea region, centred on a sea semi-enclosed by the Kabtrian peninsula to the east and fully by the Prolaisian isthmus to the west — though perhaps not for long, given an internationally controversial project by the Prolaisians to build a great canal across that isthmus. Within the sea, the large islands of the Gulf Islands archipelago form numerous straits that allow the Islanders to control the trade across their native sea.

So Get Analysing!

I hope this guide can help you to understand the geopolitical implications of fantasy geography (and, perhaps, less fantastical geography too), to identify strategically critical regions and the most likely shape of the polities populating the world.

I did my own analysis on Roshar, the world of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive a few weeks ago as an example and I’d love to do more of that. So, if anyone’s game, please send me your fantasy maps and some basic information about the world and I’ll see if I can provide any analysis, posting the result to notes. Just a bit of fun for anyone who’s up for it.

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Thank you for reading and apologies for the delay to this article, which was originally promised a few weeks back and had to get shunted around due to time constraints. Honestly, I feel I barely scratched the surface of this topic and will be sure to return to it someday with follow-ups.

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In the meantime, in two weeks my next short story will be A Spill of Wine, all about court intrigue and with some light inspirations from some recent reading on the politics of the Jacobean court and rise of the Duke of Buckingham. For two weeks after that, I have nothing currently written but plans for three different articles, so which one you’ll get is as much your guess as mine. A reading wrap-up, discussion of Kantian ethics and Terry Pratchett, or deeply indulgent piece about the French constitutions of 1791-1799 are all equally possible. Please let me know if any of these particularly speak to you — anything to help me make up my mind.

Don’t know where to continue with my writing? This might help:

Shouting over the roar of cannon and screams of men, Lieutenant Ettore Bortani urged his charges to reload, reload, reload again. To give as good as they got, though they’d been fighting an hour and oh so many were covered in blood they hoped wasn’t theirs and hastily tied bandages. Firing though acrid smoke obscured the far end of the deck and the enemy ships, identified only through the regular flashes of their rows of cannon.

Fifty guns aboard old Trikea, and two-and-twenty of them, the heavy four-and-twenty pounders, were Ettore’s, on his domain of the lower gundeck. Eleven facing to starboard and the battle. Eight still operational, all suffering from crews diminished in size and fatigued beyond mere fatigue, sweat sticking their sailors’ tails to the back of their bare torsos.

And they were losing. Ettore hadn’t been on deck since the fighting began; he could only guess how the ships manoeuvred and whether either of their allies had already struck their colours, but he didn’t need to know the details to know they were losing. He could see it all around him. Captain Zaduccci had been sure they couldn’t lose while they held the advantage in numbers – three Thasionan ships to two Xhodesii – and guns. Ettore had never been so brash.

The old girl was well past her prime; long outclassed by larger ships-of-the-line. Larger ships such as Saphalones, of four-and-sixty guns. The captain had accepted that, but reasoned that they had the support of Reverence, of six-and-thirty guns, and Prigliato, of two-and-twenty, while Saphalones sailed only with Tirasos, of two-and-thirty. They could outmanoeuvre and outshoot the Xhodesii.

Privately, Ettore had made the dissenting argument: that their enemies’ guns were heavier on average and with fewer ships could concentrate firepower, but Captain Zaducci and the first lieutenant had dismissed his concerns. Cautious Lieutenant Bortani, more a sailor than a fighter – he knew his own reputation. Vindication gave him no satisfaction.

It was out of his hands. Ettore’s job was to keep the guns firing as long as he was ordered to, no matter the cost in flesh and powder. So he encouraged the sailors and sent down to the magazine for ever more powder cartridges. He did his duty.

‘Lieutenant Bortani!’

A high voice, it pierced through the booms and shouts. A midshipman, perhaps, or one of the powder boys. Ettore placed a hand on the beam above him, bracing himself as he peered through the smoke.

‘Here,’ he called back.

And out of the smoke she emerged, a fragment of the divinity she served. Her face lined and severe; her presence radiant. An island in a sea of masculinity. Even amidst their haste, sailors who noticed her stopped to bow and touch their foreheads. Instinctively, Ettore reached down to wipe his blackened hands on his fustanella.

Madam Castiolo, priestess of Trikea. She who had blessed the ship when she was laid down, dedicating her to blind Trikea the just, such that she could carry the goddess’s name and a figurehead in her likeness. Madam Castiolo had served as priestess aboard ever since, longer than anyone else on the crew, maintaining Trikea’s shrine at the prow and pouring the daily libations of wine and oil and honey in her honour.

For like all of the greatest Islander vessels, Trikea was not merely a ship but a floating temple dedicated to her namesake deity. When such ships clashed, as Trikea and Saphalones clashed, it was a fight of the very gods, sailors merely their mortal instruments.

‘Madam Castiolo,’ Ettore acknowledged. ‘Should you not be with the surgeon, or up on deck? Have you come for the wounded?’

‘Captain Zaducci is dead. You have command, Lieutenant.’

Her words were a dive into cold water.

‘No. Where is Lieutenant—’

‘The first lieutenant fell half an hour ago. I thought you already knew. Trikea is yours.’

‘But how…’ he trailed off as a gun went off, drowning out thought for a brief, blessed moment.

‘Lieutenant! Command is yours. You’re needed on deck.’

‘Yes. Of course. Of course. Would you come? It would do the men good, to see Trikea’s priestess amongst them.’

Castiolo agreed, though in truth Ettore was merely grasping at her calm and authority like a drowning man with a scrap of driftwood. He left the ship’s gunner in temporary command of the lower deck and hurried away.

They emerged onto the quarterdeck and were met by chaos. Spars and rigging cut through by cannonballs lay strewn about, having pierced the netting above. Sailors clutched at the ropes, trying to trim a ravaged sail.

Ettore looked about as he cried for reports. Between shouted words and his own eyes, he grasped the situation. Saphalones stood within musketshot, broadside to broadside and closing the distance. A little behind her, Tirasos threatened to cross Trikea’s stern and rake her. She fired both sides: her starboard guns into Trikea and her larboard ones into Prigliato, whose attempt to outmanoeuvre the Xhodesii vessels had left her alone and vulnerable. In Trikea’s wake, Reverance had struck her colours. Fire raged on deck and her sailors had fled into her boats, impotently watching the battle and their burning ship.

They had been outmanoeuvred and outgunned. It was a fight they could not win.

‘Why have we not surrendered?’ asked Ettore, not caring who might hear. He would give the order momentarily anyway.

‘Zaducci couldn’t strike the colours,’ said Castiolo

‘He was too stubborn, you mean? Then he paid for it.’

‘No, no. I mean… did you not hear his order, Lieutenant, as we entered battle?’

Ettore’s eyes flew behind them to the poop deck and the battle ensign flying above it.

‘But surely he didn’t actually—’

‘He did. For morale. For heroism.’

‘Nail the colours to the mast?’

‘Indeed.’

Ettore dropped his voice. ‘Then what? We sit here until the ship is timbers?’

‘You have command,’ the priestess repeated.

‘Can we cut them down?’ It was a question no-one was going to answer for him. ‘We’ll have to cut them down. Pray for us, madam.’

With a confidence that was all artifice, Ettore raised his voice and issued his orders. The fourth lieutenant was sent down to the lower gundeck, to take command there. As long as battle still raged, they would continue to put up all the fight they had.

He asked a midshipman to look through the signal book and see if they could tell Prigliato to surrender. There was no point in her suffering longer than she had to. Then, the signal book would be thrown overboard. No matter what happened, it was Ettore’s duty as commander to see that the secret Thasionan signals did not find their way into enemy hands.

As for heading, he asked for a point more to starboard. It would give them an inferior angle in their bombardment of Sophalones, but delay Tirasos in her quest to rake them – to fire directly into Trikea’s stern, sending balls down her very length, visiting horrendous damage on all inside.

He was clear with his officers: they would surrender as soon as they were able to. Until then, all their primary orders were to protect Trikea and her crew.

And then there was the most critical task. Trikea flew two ensigns into battle: the larger at the stern and another atop the mainmast. Ettore ascertained that only the former had been hammered into place, so ordered the second struck without delay. But the Xhodesii ships would not recognise surrender until neither flag flew. There was nothing else for it. Under enemy fire, men would have to climb up and hack it down.

It was a huge thing, as tall as half a dozen men, for ease of visibility in the confusion of battle. All the harder to either pull the nails or slash the canvas along its entire height. It was a task, Ettore decided, he could give to none if he would not take it up himself. He gave his last orders, then asked for a group of volunteers and a boarding cutlas. The smallsword at his waist would be little use against canvas: a more brutal implement was needed.

Though the cutlas was provided, none stepped forward to volunteer. Ettore understood and despaired.

‘I shall go with you, Lieutenant,’ said Castiolo. ‘Though I’m not much of a climber.’

‘Thank you, madam. You are an inspiration, though I could not ask for more than your prayers.’

Yet – as Ettore was sure had been her intention – her example shamed four sailors into stepping forward, old hands all.

With hollow words of encouragement, Ettore led them up to the poop where, on the larboard side, stood the mast whose only task was to fly the glorious colours. The naval ensign of the Republic of Thasionos, a symbol of holy reverence to him: three horizontal stripes of blue, white, blue, with the State Crest emblazoned in the middle. And they were to desecrate it.

As Ettore looked around, he saw Castiolo was still amongst them.

‘Madam, you should return to the quarterdeck. Or to the shrine or the surgeon. This is no place for you.’

‘You asked for my prayers and it is here they are most needed. Trikea is my mistress and Trikea is my charge: I shall decide how best I may serve her.’

Ettore declined to argue, though it seemed to him that she risked her life for little, standing with them in full view of the sharpshooters in Saphalones and Tirasos’s tops. Instead, he slipped off his shoes and jacket and wiped the sweat off his hands and led the way directly up the mast.

Almost immediately, Xhodesii muskets were turned on them. Ettore heard balls whizz into the ensign and strike the gunwale. He kept climbing, crawling up the mast like he was a young midshipman again. The ship rocked and he dangled briefly above open water, clutching on though his shoulders already burned. He shook his head – he had to set an example for the men – and kept on climbing.

He was in line with the bottom of the battle ensign, but still had to clamber up its entire height. As he did, he could see the nails driven through the canvas, pinning it to the wood. They’d been driven all the way through – impossible to pull out without the right tools.

Below him, a man grunted and Ettore looked down to find him shot through the gullet, looking up and gargling blood. Ettore reached out, but the sailor went limp and fell. The second man down had to brace and push him off. The carcass dropped into the sea, another soul for Kathor to ferry to the bottom of the seas and out the other side, into the Underworld. Another denizen for Lord Demesios’ domain. He was not the first to die that day and more would join him with every moment of delay. The climb continued.

Finally, Ettore reached the very top of the mast. He wrapped his legs firmly around it and gripped the top with one hand while he reached for the cutlas with the other. The sword, he drove into the canvas of the ensign, cutting up in sawing motions until he’d produced a great tear, a foot in length, at the top of the flag. He worked the sword down, extending the cut further. Below him, the sailors replicated his actions to the same effect. They were doing it. They were cutting through.

More musket shots and Ettore cringed away, almost losing his grip. Somewhere below him, a man screamed and then another. One fell immediately. The second hung on and – Thasi bless him – stuck his weapon into the canvas when he finally dropped, cutting through a few more feet as his final act.

Ettore’s section hung free of the mast. He had to start climbing down, to finish the task. There were only two of them left, the other towards the middle and working his own way down. Great gashes ran up half the ensign’s length. Their victory was in sight.

Ettore didn’t see what happened. The final sailor was there, and then he was not. He issued not a cry nor even a grunt. He must have fallen to the sea. It was as though he had never been there; as though he had been summoned to the gods. And Ettore was alone on the mast, which was slick with sea spray, and he could barely hold on, but he had to and so he did. He cut through another section, connecting the slashed made by two of his fallen comrades, and over half of the flag was flying free, pulling away from the mast and the ship, as though it too longed for the waves.

He kept going, sliding slowly down, slashing and hacking and sawing and ripping. So close to complete, the awful task almost done. A glance behind him. Tirasos was finally in position, despite Trikea’s turn: broadside to stern. Her side was briefly a wall of fire and smoke. Cannonballs skipped across the short distance between the two ships, entering Trikea at her vulnerable back, just below the waterline, straight into the lower gundeck.

Trikea jerked violently. Ettore’s hand slipped and his chin smacked the mast. His legs went momentarily limp and he was falling, falling off the mast, flailing wildly as the deck rushed up to meet him. He hit, his head thudding against it, his teeth slamming together, a sharp pain at the tip of his tongue and blood in his mouth. He tried to get up but pain in his side stopped him. Broken rib, maybe. He looked up at the colours, the glorious ensign, tugging against the wind, almost free, still attached only at the very bottom. Yet he’d failed and Trikea and her crew would suffer for it.

‘Can you get up?’

It was Madam Castiolo. She stepped into his view, standing over him, peering down like the gods from the highest peaks. Even shaking his head pained him.

‘So close,’ he muttered.

She reached down and picked something up. The cutlas he’d dropped.

‘Now you’ll be the one praying for me,’ she said, not looking at him but up at the ensign.

Before he could say a word, she had begun her climb.

She wasn’t a good climber – about that she had not lied. But she had served aboard the ship for over two decades, its entire life. If Trikea was anyone’s, it was hers. All ships were alive – every sailor knew that – and no ships were more alive than those bearing the names of the gods. Trikea, it seemed to Ettore, welcomed the priestess, keeping stiller for her to ease her journey.

And, lying on the deck, gazing up, Ettore prayed. He prayed to Neros, King of the Sea. To Thasi, patron of their city, which was named in her honour. And to Trikea, for the blind goddess to watch over her servant and ensure that the right thing, the just thing, be done this day.

A flash as the cutlas caught the sun, and then it bit deep into the colours and was driven through, separating them entirely from the mast. The blue and white was picked up by the wind and carried away. A last few scatted shots and Trikea’s guns ceased. And those of the other ships too. And the seas were quiet. A gull laughed overhead and the waves lapped against Trikea’s battered hull.

Madam Castiolo slid down and the cutlas fell from her fingers. Ettore smiled and, through the pain, propped himself onto his elbows. Castiolo turned. Ettore’s expression turned to shock. Her blue frock was sullied by dark red and her hand went to her side, where the blood flowed free like a holy spring.

‘I thought I felt—’ she began, before dropping to her knees, her olive complexion turning white as the snow atop Mount Selos.

Forgetting the pain, Ettore crawled to her and cradled her and screamed for aid but it came too late. He watched his own tears fall onto her face as the priestess of Trikea departed for her patroness, the blind goddess who was just in the way that a balanced scale was just, but who could never be accused of mercy. Prices were always paid for her justice. It was not for mortals to quibble the exchange.

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Thank you for reading. As regular readers can surely tell, I’ve been on a bit of a naval kick recently, which I hope to continue semi-soon with a sequel to Fortune’s Favour, following the continuing adventures of Daniele A’Themi and the rest of Fortune’s crew. Readers with very good memories for made-up ships might even spot that this is Tirasos’s second outing, after her role as Fortune’s saviour in the aforementioned story.

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But so as not to overload with too much of the high seas, my next short story, in four weeks, will probably be A Spill of Wine, following the intrigues of the Savarian royal court (previously seen at a glance in the stories Four-And-A-Half Engagements and King of Chefs, Chef of Kings). Before that, in two weeks, my promised article on geopolitics in fantasy will finally arrive.

Don’t know where to continue with my writing? This might help:

Until 1971, Britain did not use a decimal currency system. Now first, let’s understand what that means.

Currencies have basic units they work in. Some currencies have only a single unit, such as the Japanese yen: every note and coin in Japan is valued in yen. Most currencies, however, have two units: a main unit and a sub-unit, such as dollars and cents or pounds and pence. It’s also possible for currencies to have three or even more units, though none do today: the only limits are our imagination and level of faff we’re willing to put up with.

A decimal currency is one with two units where the difference between the two is expressed by a factor divisible by ten. Most commonly, the main unit is worth 100 times the sub-unit. This is the system used by most — though by no means all — currencies today. The American dollar, the euro, the British pound sterling, the Swiss franc, and so on and so forth.

The trend towards decimalisation began in the 18th century, really getting going when the American dollar was first issued in 1792 and when the French decimalised their currency (and their weights and their time and their mothers and everything else they could get their hands on) during the revolution.

And, of course, you can see the advantages. Thanks to our base ten counting system, having a base ten currency system makes certain kinds of maths just much easier. So yes, it makes a lot of sense to decimalise and, predictably, the rest of the world followed suit.

Except, of course, for Britain, which stubbornly kept its old system well into the second half of the 20th century. A system in which a scizzlepomp was worth seven-and-four-ninths of a gaggawack, and had even more arcane relationships to umpteen other coins. A system that wasn’t just old-fashioned, but ridiculous, absurd, and downright funny. And yet, if that was the truth, then whyever was such a system adopted and how did it stay around for so long?

In today’s rant, we’re going to go through the history of European currency and seek to explain the pre-decimal British system. And, by the end of that, we’ll have found that the system was fine, that it wasn’t that confusing, but that nonetheless decimalisation was long overdue by the time it happened.

The Romans to Charlemagne to Britain

Because, like so many systems in Europe, this all starts with the Romans, who used a silver coin called the denarius among various others. Its name derived from its original value: ten asses, (which we can all laugh about before moving on) with the as being both a coin and one of the basic currency units of Republican Roman coinage. The denarius is important. Remember the denarius.

In the late empire, debasement became a huge problem, causing inflation and lowering the value of the coinage in circulation, to the point that the denarius, as, and other lower valued coins fell out of use. At the same time, central authority crumbled and different regions started diverging in their practices. This was a problem.

And then along came the Carolingians, forging an empire across France, the low countries, Germany, and northern Italy. In particular under Charlemagne himself, this empire was able to impose standardised systems back onto these regions in a way not seen since the Roman Empire was at its height. One of those systems was currency.

Charlemagne made the silver denarius the core unit again. (See, told you it was important.) He also re-standardised the weight of a pound (libra, in Latin) and decreed that each of his new denarii would have 1/240 of that new pound’s weight of silver. Charlemagne’s pound weighed about 400 grams, meaning each of his denarii had a little under 1.7 grams of silver. Between the two was another unit, the solidus — originally introduced during the Roman inflationary period and literally named ‘solid’, as in ‘this is a coin you can trust’ — worth 1/20 of a pound, and therefore equal to 12 denarii.

In other words, Charlemagne’s system had three basic units. 12 denarii made one solidus and 20 solidi made one libra. In German, different names were used: pfennig for denarius, schilling for solidus, and pfund for libra. In English, where the exact same system was adopted, those terms were rendered as penny, shilling, and pound, and it was this system, without modification, which was kept for over a millennium until it was decimalised in 1971. France also used this system prior to its decimalisation, with deniers, sous, and libres1, though by the revolution inflation had rendered deniers obsolete.

Now, those numbers — 12 and 20 — seem very silly compared to a nice round 100. But they make more sense than you might think.

12 is a great number. I’d go so far as to call it the best number. At least, it’s the best number if you need to divide a lot, because 12 divides neatly into two, three, four, and six. The only integer less than half of itself that 12 doesn’t divide neatly into is five. By contrast, ten is an awful number for division. It only divides neatly into two and five, and dividing by two is a trait it shares in common with half of all numbers, which is frankly rubbish. 12 is more divisible than 10 while also being larger. Divisibility is a really useful thing for a currency to have for all the reasons I’m sure you can think of for yourself, and that’s the genius of the shilling.

But ten is a really good number for all the reasons that decimalisation is useful, so maybe we should use ten in our system. But, and here’s where we’ll get clever, we’ll combine the ease of dividing and multiplying by ten with the similar ease of doing the same with two, which just requires doubling and halving. And that’s the utility of having 20 shillings to the pound, as it only requires the additional step of doubling or halving after doing all your usual base ten maths. So, to convert 26 pounds into shillings, we just double it to 52 and add a zero, making 520. Easy. To convert back, we knock off the zero and halve.

That’s literally the entire system. Three units with a ratio of 240d:20s:1£. (As a Latin holdover, ‘d’ for denarius was used for penny and ‘L’ for libra was used for pound, stylised into ‘£’.) Not very confusing and actually quite sensical once you think about it, particularly when you realise that the shilling and pound weren’t originally supposed to be coins: they were merely units to make accounting easier. Coins worth one shilling and one pound weren’t issued until the late medieval and early modern periods respectively, after inflation had slowly eroded their value. In other words, doing maths with them was the only reason they existed and having to actually handle coins worth those amounts was a later addition to the system.

But What About All The Coins?

Because that’s what people tend to get hung up on: that there were lots of different coins that related to each other in confusing ways. Here’s how the system is often presented:

Two farthings make a ha’penny, two of which make a penny, two of which make a tuppence, one-and-a-half of which makes a thruppence, two of which make a sixpence, two of which make a shilling, two of which make a florin, one-and-one-quarter of which makes a half-crown, two of which make a crown, two of which make a half-sovereign, two of which make a sovereign.

But then, that’s how any currency looks when you stop looking at its coins in relation to the basic units and instead only look at them in relation to each other. If I was to say that five pennies make a nickel, two of which make a dime, two-and-a-half of which make a quarter, four of which make a dollar, that would also sound confusing. Except, of course, those are really just the names of different coins worth a certain number of cents, with their relationship to each other being of secondary importance.

So too with pre-decimal British currency. ‘Farthing’ is just the name of the coin worth 1/4 of a penny. ‘Crown’ is just the name of the coin worth 5 shillings. I’ll give it to you that some are slightly confusing amounts — like the half-crown being worth 2.5 shillings, AKA 30 pence — but even those are easy to wrap your head around. Fundamentally, this system just existed for a long time, over the course of which lots of different coins were issued, all of which developed their own names.

And Then There’s the Guinea

Except that I have to cede and rant about the genuinely confusing one: guineas, which were in circulation from the late-17th to the early-19th century and hence I have to read about them a lot because that’s precisely my period. Basically, the guinea — named after the origin of some of the gold used to make it — was supposed to be worth one pound, but because it was made of gold, while shillings were made of silver, its value relative to the more common shilling could shift due to fluctuations in the price gold and silver, and its value was eventually fixed at one pound and one shilling, AKA 21 shillings.

And, because they were the most valuable coin in circulation, and the one closest to one pound, guineas ended up being a really popular coin that were also used as a unit of accounting, and later coins were struck worth half, a third, and a quarter the guinea. So a guinea is 21 shillings, a half guinea is ten shillings and sixpence, the third guinea is seven shillings, and the quarter guinea is 5 shillings and thruppence. An absurd system, even for Britain, and so after being hugely popular in the 18th century, guineas were abolished in 1816, replaced by a coin worth exactly one pound called the sovereign, which after about a century was itself replaced by the one pound note. (So now we can forget about guineas and move on.)

But We Still Should’ve Decimalised Sooner

Because no, I’m not leading up to a ‘bring back pre-decimal currency’ hot take. The advantage that the pre-decimal currency had is mostly in the ease of dividing up shillings evenly. That’s really important if your lowest unit — the penny, in this case — is worth enough that people actually care about it. Except, by the 20th century, that just wasn’t the case.

I mentioned earlier that Carolingian pennies were made of a little under 1.7 grams of silver. The price of that silver today is something like £3, or 300 modern pennies2. This is something I think most people don’t understand about pre-modern coinage: it was much less granular. I use as a rule of thumb that an average day-labourer in 18th century Britain could expect to earn about a shilling a day.3 That is, 12 pennies, in a system where the smallest coin was worth 1/4 of a penny. If they converted their wages into the smallest coins possible, they’d have 48 farthings. Today, working a full day at the British minimum wage would earn someone over £100. Converting that into the smallest coins possible, you get 10,000 pennies.

The penny today is effectively worthless, so no-one cares if you occasionally have to round up or down a bit. Already by 1900, the purchasing power of the penny had decreased hugely from just a century previously, as indeed it continued to decrease. With the penny increasingly worthless, being able to divide shillings equally became increasingly unimportant, meanwhile the advantages of a purely decimal system were ever present. So, by the 1970s, the change was long, long overdue and the only oddity is why it took us so long.

But we can recognise the advantage of making that switch while still understanding and appreciating the pre-decimal system with its own advantages and history and which, at the end of the day, was pretty straight forward once you understood it.

And, as a final aside, I do think we lost something in the decimalisation: all those fun names with all their history! Modern British coins are, frankly, very boring. Even the Americans have fun names for their coins, while we’re left saying things like ‘20 pence piece’. (This is also true of the euro, by the by, the currency I actually use in my day-to-day life.) So, I’m proposing that we bring back some cool names again, even if the values aren’t exactly the same as what they were. Here’s my proposal: we start calling the ten pence a shilling, the 20 pence a florin, and the 50 pence a crown. (Everything under ten pence is frankly useless and shouldn’t be minted anymore anyway.) Just start doing it in your day to day life, I’m sure it’ll catch on soon and absolutely no-one will look at you funny in the meantime.

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This slot was supposed to go to an article about how to geopolitically analayse a fantasy world, and thereby how to craft a world with interesting political geography, but that had to be delayed due to time constraints, so look forward to it in three weeks.

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In the meantime, next week we’ll be returning to some naval fiction with the story Strike the Colours! following a young officer unexpectedly left in command of a losing fight. If you’d like to check out something in a similar vein to tie you over, here’s my last foray onto the high seas:

Don’t know where the continue with my writing? This might help:

It’s May the 4th and therefore time to share my prequel opinions.

First, I grew up with the prequels just as much as I did with the original trilogy. I loved all six of those films as a kid and only began to reappraise the prequels later. Overall, I think the fundamentals are there and without too much workshopping they could’ve been really good films. And so, as a writer myself, I’ve spent far too long thinking about the changes I would make. Presented here are my ideas for how each film might’ve been fixed.

The Promising Start

The Phantom Menace is, for me, an overall pretty good film with very high highs — the opening and Duel of the Fates fight being standout — and very low lows: everything involving the Gungans and Tatooine, and the serious problems with Anakin.

On the Gungans: the kids still need something, but you don’t want your kid-focused comic relief to be cringey and off-putting to the adults. There’s nothing in particular wrong with the Gungan storyline, but they needed to be replaced by an alien species that is much cuter (make them fluffy! Wookiees and Ewoks are adorable; early CGI fish people are not) and that doesn’t speak English. If you want my ideas — and why else are you here? — I’d make them smaller than a human but larger than an Ewok, they’d live in underground warrens, and be a calm, gentle group forced into violence by droid incursions. Maybe they’d even have some kind of innate force sensitivity. Something to make them distinct from the aforementioned Wookiees and Ewoks while still being cute and acting funny.

Tatooine is harder to fix, but needs to be better integrated into the plot and — here’s where I propose the big change — Anakin should’ve been closer to Luke’s age. I think Maul should already have been pursuing our heroes when they left Naboo and Tatooine should’ve been explicitly chosen as a hideout due to how out of the way it is. They get to Tatooine, but Maul’s still pursuing them. We get a brief lighsabre duel and then along comes Anakin to save them, doing something to show his force aptitude and, in a space chase sequence, he uses his piloting abilities to lose Maul. Also, Shmi dies here rather than in the next film. As she’s dying, Anakin asks Quigon to save her but he says that some powers are beyond even the Jedi because foreshadowing.

This Anakin is halfway between Luke and Han Solo, but with an edge: he’s seen the world and knows that the Jedi and Republic have never done anything to help him or his. Yet, partially due to a spark between him and a now age-appropriate Padme, he joins the adventure. Initially, there’s a rivalry between him and Obiwan, who’s less than a decade his senior, but they agree to put that behind them when Quigon dies and Obiwan takes Anakin on as an apprentice.

Aging up Anakin is the biggest change but it makes everything better. The film was marketed in part based on ‘how could this cute kid become Darth Vader’ which is compelling, but not as compelling as telling a good story, and youngish adult Anakin is just a better story. As a result of completely changing Tatooine, pod-racing gets cut and, as an established pilot, Anakin actually gets asked to lead the desperate Naboo attack on the Trade Federation fleet. Starting the Anakin-Padme romance here (initially just a spark, before they don’t see each other for a few years) also means the second film doesn’t have to cram in so much of their romance. Oh, and don’t mention virgin births and midichlorians.

The Terrible Middle

Now, Attack of the Clones is a much worse film than The Phantom Menace. But even here there are good bones to work with. Everything up to everyone leaving Coruscant is pretty good or, at least, needs only minimal work. And then it goes to hell. So, here’s my fix: we stay on Coruscant.

Instead of Anakin and Padme going on a romantic retreat with nothing to do but spout awful dialogue, Padme refuses to leave (because she’s a badass political operator used to being in danger) and our three main characters embark on a politically charged investigation into who’s trying to kill Padme. Dooku is an actual character, politically clashing with Chancellor Palpatine due to his status as a leader of the separatist movement (hiding their actual relationship), and one of our possible suspects. However, Dooku makes a lot of sense to Anakin, arguing that the Republic is not fit for purpose, full of corruption and backstabbing, that the Jedi are no better (hence he left), and that every planet has to look out for itself. Padme and Anakin are now doing something while they incidentally fall in love and Obiwan pretends not to notice.

Then, Dooku reveals on the Senate floor that the Republic is building an army of clones to crush any opposition! Palpatine acts confused, saying it’s possible his predecessor planned something secretly, and begs Obiwan to investigate and, if needed, shut down this illegal military buildup. Meanwhile, Anakin and Padme, finally alone, can get it on. While Obiwan in gone, they uncover that Dooku was behind the assassination and go to confront him but are attacked. Seeing Padme threatened, Anakin sees red and does a truly horrendous amount of damage before being subdued. Dooku smuggles them out of Coruscant to the separatist base of Geonosis, where he’s preparing to declare independence from the Republic.

Obiwan gets back to Coruscant, where he tells Palpatine that there is indeed a clone army. Palpatine says he’ll shut it down but, just then, they get word of Padme and Anakin’s capture, and evidence of a separatist droid army that they’re able to gather during an aborted escape attempt. So, apparently reluctantly, Palpatine goes to the Senate to announce this and that the clone army, previously unknown to him, has been mobilised to end a rebellion. Obiwan infiltrates Geonosis covertly with a force of Jedi while Yoda leads the clones into battle. The end of the film is basically the same, except now we care about Dooku and he and Anakin can have a conversation as they fight about the structural defects of the Republic.

The Almost Good Ending

Fixing Anakin in the first two films already goes a long way towards fixing the third film, the flaws of which a heavily tied up with Anakin’s motivations. (Or lack thereof.)

Again, we can keep the beginning basically intact. It’s a good sequence! And I think the basic political setup is good, but needs to be clarified and brought more sharply into focus. Palpatine is increasingly distrusted as he takes more power, ostensibly as emergency measures, which Anakin supports — favouring a strongman to cut through the Republic’s flaws — but which worries Padme, Obiwan, and the Jedi council. Anakin finds his loyalties tested as Padme begins to lead the opposition to Palpatine’s power grabs. Maybe there’s even legislation going through the Senate to extend Palpatine’s term as chancellor beyond the usual limits and granting him greater discretionary powers, which could then be a concrete focus for the political back-and-forth.

I don’t think Anakin should’ve stayed on Coruscant with nothing to do but mope. He should’ve returned to the war with Obiwan, leaving Padme to do the Coruscant political plot. However, Padme could’ve then gotten critically injured in an attack on the Senate, causing Anakin to return, finding that Palpatine has unilaterally declared martial law and the suspension of elections in response to the attack. The Jedi council tell Anakin to arrest Palpatine for going beyond his powers, but Anakin agrees that something had to be done, and then Palpatine reveals that he can save Padme. He begins to heal her, Luke and Leia are born, but — at that moment — the Jedi attack, planning to arrest Palpatine. This forces him to stop healing Padme to defend himself, meaning that she dies.

At that point, Anakin would have a much better reason to hate the Jedi and support Palpatine, who announces that the Jedi attempted a coup and therefore must be suppressed. Order 66 goes out and Anakin leads an attack on the Jedi temple where he doesn’t kill any children. The ending plays out the same, with the Empire being declared and Anakin being sent to decapitate the separatist leadership. Anakin genuinely thinks that Obiwan will join forces with him once the Jedi’s role in Padme’s death is revealed to him, but Obiwan maintains that Padme would never have supported an empire and that the Jedi were right to attempt to depose Palpatine, leading to their fight. Meanwhile, Yoda’s fight with Palpatine is a distraction so Luke and Leia can be smuggled out from beneath his clutches, meaning that Anakin can blame the Jedi not only for Padme’s death but also for abducting his children. Upon becoming Darth Vader, he vows to hunt down all remaining Jedi to recover his stolen children. (Why did Vader never look on Tatooine for his son is certainly a plot hole, but it’s already a plot hole in the original trilogy, so the prequels get a pass for that particular issue.)

Until The Next Rant

In my opinion, these would’ve been much better films that still keep the underlying ideas of the films we got. Mostly, they’re about making tighter plots, giving Anakin better motivations, and allowing Padme to actually do something after the first film.

There are people, of course, for whom that doesn’t go far enough. Who wants political intrigue and trade policy in their Star Wars, they ask? Me, I do, I want that very much, and you would too if it was better handled. Or, even more substantially, some argue there shouldn’t have been prequels altogether. That’s a whole other debate but, personally, I’m not opposed to a good prequel, particularly if it can stand on its own as just a good story. Personally, I quite like the dramatic irony they’re able to play with.

So, how’d I do? Do you think I’ve fixed them or were they beyond repair? More prequel discussion is very much appreciated.

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Like a few other rants, this was supposed to be a note but grew out of control. I’ve got another about coinage I accidentally wrote just yesterday, which I’ll save up to release another time. As this is entirely outside of my usual release schedule, I’ll be posting my usual non-fiction — in this case a guide to geopolitically analysing fantasy worlds — next Thursday.

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Lucette hadn’t been working for Madam Tulaggio above three months when she saw her mistress die.

She’d been a long time dying. Longer than those three months of employment, certainly. Cancer of the stomach. A slow and painful way to go, but Madam Tulaggio had borne it well, even in her last, bedridden weeks.

Before those weeks, Lucette had rarely entered her mistress’s presence, only ever sent to the chambers where Tulaggio wasn’t, toiling away unseen, a brownie of sorts. But the bedchamber needed cleaning and the fire building up, so her mistress had to put up with seeing the maids for a change.

It made Lucette shiver, feeling her mistress’s eyes on her as she bumbled around the room, yet never had Madam Tullagio deigned to speak to her except once, to ask for another log on the hearth in her paper-thin voice. Lucette was sure Madam Tullagio thought her slow and unthorough in her work. She was a terrible chambermaid. She knew it and the other staff knew it and the mistress knew it.

But then, no other girl had wanted to take on a position under a dying mistress, with no guarantee of continued employment in her inheritor’s household. No other girl but Lucette, who was too old to start in service, at 17 years, but who had pleaded for the work and promised – a lie, though she had meant it at the time – to labour hard and learn fast.

Her father, a master in the clockmaker’s guild, would never have let Lucette stoop so far as to accept work as a servant. But then, it was her father’s death and stepfather’s refusal to take her into his household that had made a desperate and hasty search for work an absolute necessity.

The day Madam Tulaggio died, Jacques was there too. A footman, he was also far below his natural station, though he kept his origins mysterious. He was Prolaisian, Lucette knew that much, and a few years her elder. He encouraged her to sing for the servants after the first time he’d heard her, claiming she was as good as the opera – as though he’d ever seen it, though the claim was gratifying all the same. Educated, he was a favourite of the mistress’s, who had him read to her as she lay day after day, and of the other staff, who enjoyed his stories of travel and of Tabresorteux, a city so much larger than Lazzina could ever aspire to.

He was sitting by the bed on a chair that creaked as he shifted, reading a novel. One of the moralising ones the mistress liked. Lucette was listening to him more than she was working. Listening more than Madam Tulaggio, she suspected, whose eyes were closed and breathing was shallow.

A repetition of a scene seen most days in the mistress’s bedchamber. Jacques would read until she was asleep – though often as not the mistress’s eyes would snap open the moment he stopped and command him to continue. A week previously, when he had finally risen from the chair, complaining that his leg had fallen asleep before Tullagio had, he hesitated by the dresser.

‘This ribbon is very beautiful,’ he said.

Lucette had stopped cleaning. She suspected she was only making things worse anyway.

‘Which?’ she asked.

He indicated a strip of scarlet, dangling from the mirror.

‘It would look pretty in your hair,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could buy one like it.’

‘On my stater and tuppence a week?’

And he had left.

A week on and there they were again. Jacques trailed off from his reading.

‘Mistress?’ he said.

Lucette paused and looked over. She wasn’t supposed to speak in front of the mistress.

‘Something changed. Not sleep. She breaths deeper when she sleeps.’ Jacques put his hand close to Madam Tulaggio’s face. ‘I hardly feel anything.’

If the mistress’s chest rose and fell, it was imperceptible to Lucette.

‘Jacques, I think—’

‘Stay with her, Lucette. I’ll find Mr Vatani. Send for her physician.’ He looked at Lucette with large eyes. ‘Stay with her,’ he repeated.

A priest would be of more help than a physician, but Lucette didn’t say that. Instead, she sat down in Jacques’s chair, which creaked for her as it did for him, and kept vigil. Madam Tullagio’s eyes didn’t open. No air stirred in her breast. In a fit of impertinence, Lucette gripped her mistress’s bony, liver-spotted wrist but felt no beating pulse under her fingers.

When Jacques returned with Mr Vatani, Madam Tulaggio’s steward and secretary and man of business, Lucette was banished from the room. The physician arrived but didn’t stay long. Only then, finally, did they send for a priest to say the prayers and sanctify the body.

For the rest of the day, the house was quiet. Lucette and the other maid weren’t told any different, so continued their never-ending rotation through the rooms. From the dining room, she heard the door ease open and softly shut. Master Tulaggio, the nephew and inheritor, Lucette assumed. He had his own household over the river, on the other side of Lazzina.

Rumour in those final weeks was that he planned to sell the house and, in the meantime, close it up. A few servants, the good ones, he might take into his service. Lucette didn’t suffer from the delusion that she could find herself amongst them. But with a good reference, perhaps she would find another position. It was something. After a while, the door opened and shut once more, and she went back to her cleaning.

###

The household was chaos, over the following days, as the task of cataloguing all Madam Tulaggio had owned began. Everyone was conscripted into the task, even the maids. Some of it would be sent to Master Tulaggio’s house. Some would be sold. The rest returned to its place, presumably wondering what all the bother was about.

It was Mr Vatani who had hired Lucette and he who could write the most authoritative reference. Lucette needed that reference. Whether he had forgotten her in the confusion or merely did not care, he had not approached her to offer one. Instead, she spent those days trying to catch him alone, to make her request. When she finally did, it was the day of the mistress’s funeral, and Vatani was preparing to leave.

‘Excuse me, Mr Vatani, sir,’ Lucette said.

He was in the servant’s hall, already in his overcoat. The servants hadn’t been invited, but nor did Vatani trust them to continue the work without supervision, so a few had been given the day off.

‘Yes, Lucette?’ He had a reedy body and oversized head. It was a wonder he could remain upright.

‘I was wondering, sir, if you had given any thought to a reference. It’s only—’

‘If I can find the time. But really, I have a lot to be getting on with.’

‘Of course, Mr Vatani.’ Lucette kept her gaze firmly on his shoes and the cotton stockings that emerged from them. ‘When you hired me, you said—’

‘I’m aware of what I said, Lucette.’ That, though the work would most likely not be for long, it would at least get her a reference, which she would need to be hired anywhere else.

He turned to go, but stopped and added, ‘You can read, can’t you, Lucette?’

‘I can, sir. And write.’

He clicked his tongue in what sounded very much like annoyance.

‘A useful skill for a tradesman’s wife. Quite the reverse for a servant. One other thing, Lucette: it appears a ribbon has been misplaced from Madam Tullagio’s chambers. A red ribbon. Did you perhaps move it while cleaning?’

‘No, sir.’

He nodded once and, without another word, departed.

###

The following day, at servants’ dinner, Mr Vatani stormed in. Not in search of a meal: eating with them was beneath him. At the sight of him, all rose in haste.

‘I’m afraid a possession of Madam Tullagio’s has gone missing. I’ll be conducting searches of all your rooms, starting now. I hope not to find anything.’

The room was all wide eyes and open mouths. Vatani didn’t wait for questions.

‘It’s absurd!’ Lucette said, directing the exclamation at Jacques merely because he was sat next to her. ‘Can’t find something; assume the servants stole it. Absurd!’

‘Yes, yes you’re quite right. Authority makes tyrants of men. The pettier the authority, the pettier the tyranny.’ Jacques’s voice was hurried; his breath shallow. ‘And what could possibly have gone missing?’

‘A red ribbon, I think. Mr Vatani asked me about it yesterday. Probably the one you pointed out to me the other day.’

‘Oh? Oh. Well yes, of course it’ll turn up.’

The searches did not take long. Not quite an hour later, Vatani summoned the servants from their tasks. As they congregated, there was no mistaking the ribbon clutched in his fist. His face was a mask of white fury.

‘I am disappointed to say that this item was discovered in one of your rooms.’

He held it up between thumb and forefinger, a wispy little piece of muslin. Such an insubstantial thing. Who would be stupid enough to risk their position for it?

‘Jacques, can you explain yourself?’

‘Mr Vatani?’ Jacques squeaked. There were a few hasty intakes of breath. Those around him stepped a little away from the offender, like his guilt was contagious.

‘How did this end up in your room, Jacques?’

‘I… I don’t know, sir.’

‘You don’t know, Jacques?’ Vatani was close to shouting. ‘Did you take it? Either you took it, or someone gave it to you.’

Jacques stuttered for a few moments. His eyes were wild terror.

‘I was given it, sir,’ he said, his voice all desperation.

‘Given it? Are you sure about that?’

‘Yes, sir. Yes. Given it. Someone gave it to me. I wouldn’t… I didn’t…’

‘Who?’

‘Who!’ Jacques echoed. ‘I don’t…’

‘Come now! You must know who gave it to you!’

‘I um…’ The accused’s eyes ran haphazardly around the room. They met Lucette’s and stayed there a moment, before falling to the ground.

‘Lucette,’ Jacques said. ‘Lucette gave it to me.’

‘What?’ said Lucette, shaking her head and backing away. ‘No. I swear. I didn’t give—’

‘You’re sure it was Lucette, Jacques?’

Jacques briefly met her gaze again. She tried to send him her terror and her fury. The sickness in her stomach and the pounding in her ears. He himself looked like the rabbit who has heard the shot but not yet felt the bullet.

‘Yes,’ Jacques said. ‘It was Lucette. She gave it to me. I’m sure.’

‘Lucette,’ Vatani intoned, turning his face and his anger on her. ‘Is this true?’

‘No! No, sir. I didn’t take any ribbon! Sir, I—’

‘When I asked you about it, were you aware it was missing?’

‘Yesterday, you mean, sir? No, no I—’

‘But you’ve seen this ribbon before, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Lucette replied, trying her best to understand the situation – and what it would mean for her if she wasn’t believed. ‘I’ve seen it in Madam Tulaggio’s room. When I was cleaning.’

‘Saw it, and coveted it?’

‘No, sir!’ The audience, the half dozen other servants, made it all worse. A public humiliation for a crime she hadn’t committed. ‘I would never—’

‘But it’s the kind of thing girl’s like, isn’t it? Like to wear in their pretty hair?’

‘I suppose, sir, but—’

‘Am I supposed to believe that Jacques wanted to wear it in his hair?’

‘I didn’t say—’

‘Then what do you expect me to believe, Lucette?’

‘Sir, I didn’t take it! It wasn’t in my room! Why—’

‘Jacques, if she gave it to you, why did you not report it?’

Jacques’s head shot up, as though he were surprised to be drawn back into it all. He cringed back. Mr Vatani pushed on.

‘Did you not know it was Madam Tulaggio’s?

‘No, sir! I didn’t… I hadn’t seen it before. Or I didn’t recognise it. I don’t pay attention to ribbons.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you would.’

‘But he did!’ Lucette cried. ‘He showed it to me! He said it would suit me.’

‘Jacques! Did you do that?’

‘No, sir! I never… no sir.’

‘Jacques,’ Lucette pleaded. ‘Jacques, please. Please just… why are you doing this?’

‘It sounds as though you thought it would suit you, Lucette,’ said Vatani with a tut. ‘And passed it onto an unsuspecting young man when you realised what would happen if – and when – you were caught with it. If Jacques knew it was stolen, why did he make no effort to hide it?’

‘Sir?’ Lucette said. ‘Why would I know? I can’t answer for—’

‘No, you cannot answer. I’ve known a lot of girls like you, Lucette.’

‘I didn’t do anything!’

With that simple, honest plea, the tears she had been holding back finally broke through. She sobbed and repeated her innocence. A blurry Vatani was unmoved. It was Lucette that the other servants left in a ring of isolation.

‘Not all men are moved by a few silly tears.’ Mr Vatani’s voice was pure distain. ‘Pack your things, Lucette. Leave immediately, and be glad that’s as far as we shall take it.’

‘But sir, my—’

‘Reference, Lucette? Be thankful I won’t write one. You wouldn’t like the things I have to say.’

###

There wasn’t much to pack, in truth. Her cheeks were wet and she wanted to lie down and parse it all, but didn’t let herself. Lucette gathered her few possessions, including the fifteen marks, nine pence she’d saved up from her wages, wiped her eyes, and slipped away.

The other servants had returned to their tasks without even a word to her. All, it seemed, had made sure she would not encounter them as she departed. All but one. For, by the servants’ door, stood Jacques, his face drained of colour, pacing back and forth.

‘Lucette!’ he cried as he saw her. ‘Lucette, you have to understand—’

‘Get away, Jacques.’

Lucette stepped to the side, to go around him. He moved into her way.

‘No, I mean… I took it for you, because you deserve something pretty. And then I panicked and I—’

‘Get away!’

She barrelled through him, forcing him to step away, anger her momentum. He made as though to take her arm, which she snatched away, drawing herself up to him. If he touched her, she’d scream. He wilted and stepped back, tears welling in his eyes, as though he had any right to them.

‘I only—’

‘I don’t care. Whatever it is, I don’t care.’

Lucette slammed the door behind her, leaving herself in the clingy evening air of high summer. Her stepfather, surely, would take her in for a night. Her mother could do that for her, at least. Forced to live on them, her saved wages would keep a roof over her head and food in her belly for no more than a month. She could write to her father’s sister in Hjorrbrye, perhaps, in hope of a position.

And then? And then she knew not. And then she would make the best of it, wherever the current pushed her, she supposed, hoping for naught but safety and comfort and the odd little extravagance, which was all she’d ever really wanted – all, she suspected, most people really wanted. Lucette took a moment to adjust her bonnet and started on her way.

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Thank you for reading. I’d like to write more vignettes from Lucette’s life, which I might base somewhat on that of Theroigne de Mericourt. In general, I’d like to write more from working class perspectives in my world, which often fall by the wayside when I focus on the movers and shakers.

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In two weeks, my next article will be about how a fantasy writer can analyse the geopolitics of their own constructed world — anything to put my IR degree to use. Two weeks after that, I think I’ll already be returning to naval fiction with the story Strike the Colours! about, amongst other things, why literally ‘nailing the colours to the mast’ isn’t always the best idea.

Don’t know where to continue with my writing? This might help:

‘Pay it no heed. You’ll get worse than that while you’re here.’

‘Listen to him,’ says another. ‘A true veteran. Queried a dozen novels.’

‘And an anthology,’ the first cuts it. ‘Not sure what I was thinking with that one.’

‘Aye, and an anthology. He knows what he’s about, kid. Stick with him.’

‘I got close once, you know. Saw the whites of their eyes. Multiple full requests. Even had a call; they never got back to me.’

‘Just gotta keep trying. Alright, that’s the whistle. Form up: over we go.’

‘Good luck,’ I manage.

‘And to you, kid. You’ll need it.’

I’m querying a novel!

Querying is the worst part of writing, we all know that. A time of excitement and anxiety that mostly leads to a crickets and maybe, if you’re lucky, a voice or two calling through the night. (And that voice is but the first step on a much longer journey.)

Nonetheless, if you want to publish traditionally and don’t have any way to circumvent it, it’s a necessity. And, given structural forces in the industry, I don’t really see a better way of doing things, sadly.1 So, the best we can do is hold our noses, write the best query we can, and dive in.

Today, I’d like to discuss why I personally chose to go this route (as opposed to self-publication or throwing my manuscript into the ocean where at least the dolphins might enjoy it), my approach and experience, and share a little about this particular novel.

Why Go Traditional?

Because, of course, this isn’t the only option. Indie pub has proven itself viable for many writers, after all. Substack — this very platform — is used by many of them. I myself independently publish all my short fiction to this here substack, making branching out into self-published novels a natural extension. Why, then, am I so insistent on trying to get this novel published traditionally?

Well, novels and short stories are very different in the market today. I write fantasy, which effectively began in the short story magazines, most importantly with Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. For decades, fantasy and its cousin sci-fi were built around the magazines. They sold well and, if you wanted to publish a novel, you were expected to first publish short fiction to prove you had what it takes.

But then the magazines died. I’m no expert as to why. The rise of the paperback led to a rise in novel reading and decline in short story reading. Epic fantasy’s dominance in the 1980s changed the default format of fantasy from short fiction to incredibly long fiction. Comic books fulfilled the same storytelling niche of recurring characters having adventures, directed at a similar demographic. Maybe a small family of pixies played their part too.

Whatever the reasons, most readers today pick up novels almost exclusively. The result of that is that the magazines died and those that continue have a shoestring budget and languishing sales. The whole industry is a bit of a closed circuit, with the people who read short fiction being the same people who write it. With no money, few readers, and an avalanche of submissions, the remaining markets struggle to cope. They can’t pay much and do whatever they can to limit submissions: no simultaneous submissions is an industry standard despite being (as far as I’m concerned) absurd, and many have simply closed open submissions altogether.

Knowing that I was writing short fiction faster that it could be published (even if anyone wanted to publish it), that the publishing process was an incredible hassle, that I wouldn’t make any money from it anyway, and that the audiences would be tiny, I decided to go another way. And I’m glad I did! In a year of doing whatever this is, I’ve built an audience in the hundreds and have released 18 short stories along with 14 non-fiction articles. Frankly, the advantages to traditional publication for short fiction are very small, mostly adding up to the possibility of awards and a bit of pocket money.

Without wanting to rain on anyone’s parade, the basic problem here is structural and so will also plague substack-native attempts at the same thing. All those subscribers substack short fiction magazines get before they’ve even published a single story? They’re not eager readers proving a fertile market, they’re writers gearing up to flood another submissions box. Practices like charging for faster replies or editorial notes shows that they themselves know their best chance to make money is from desperate writers.

In contrast, however, the traditional novel publication industry. Lots of people still read novels and, as a result, that industry is completely different, making a very different comparison to self-pub.

The industry publishes a huge number of novels each year — in proportional comparison, novels are much more likely to be picked up than short stories. Traditional publication is usually the only way to get a book on a large number of physical shelves, which is still where a huge number of novels are bought. (In general, traditionally published novels still usually sell many more copies than self-published ones, and do so much more reliably.) And a traditionally published novel is guaranteed to make money for the writer in the form of an advance, even if (as is likely) it never earns out.

Beyond all that, traditionally published books receive professional editing, which an indie writer has to pay for out of pocket, likely leaving them in the red on the whole project. And, while writers of all stripes have to do a lot of their own publicity, indie writers are left without even that small amount of support that a traditional publisher can give. (Contact with a publicist, blurbing, and promotion through their own channels being, as far as I can see, the big ones, along with the basic publicity of physical books on physical shelves.)

None of which is to say that self-pub is a bad option. If you’re writing in a format that the traditional industry doesn’t really deal with, for example if you’re serialising or writing a novella every few months rather than a novel every year. If you’re writing a genre that is big in indie but less so in traditional, like progression fantasy, litRPG, or erotica. If you have a large audience already, and thereby guaranteed sales. These in particular are all great reasons to go indie, and I’m sure there are many besides.

(There are also, I’ll add, very bad reasons to choose indie. Using indie as a fallback for a rejected novel is, in my opinion, usually a bad idea, in particular if you haven’t made an honest appraisal of why the novel was rejected and what work it might genuinely still need. Fears over creative control are, from what I’ve seen, usually unfounded. Also, having a general chip on your shoulder about the industry, an ill-defined resentment possibly stemming from political notions, should perhaps lead to introspection rather than seizing upon indie like some kind of literary messiah come to deliver the hammer of judgement on the big bad industry.)

All of which is to say that, for me, writing novels that fit very comfortably within what is getting published today and without that large audience, I’ve only ever seriously considered traditional publication. The pros just blow the cons out of the water, at least at the moment and at least for me. Ultimately, I think all writers right now should be looking at every project individually and critically assessing where it would best succeed.2 We should all be hybrid in our mentality, even if we mostly skew in a particular direction.

My Journey

This is the second novel I’ve completed. The first is now very much shelved but, after I’d finished editing it, I did briefly query it to a few agents. On reflection, the book wasn’t very good. It suffered from so many first novel problems, in particular my desire to shove in every thought I’ve ever had along with major structural problems. It was too episodic and the pacing was all over the place. Also, I didn’t really understand the industry or the querying process. My query letter — oh how I cringe now — discussed what I thought was important about the book, which was its themes and inspirations, rather than what an agent would think is important, which is what happens and whether they can sell it.

So, of course, I got nothing but a few form rejections. We live and learn. What doesn’t kill us makes us look around sheepishly hoping no-one was watching.

After that experience, I sat back and had a think. I enjoyed writing, I decided. I’d do it for the rest of my life, whether or not anyone was reading it; whether or not I ever got published. And, if I spent the next decade writing decent quality novels and querying each of them, I figured that someone would give me the time of day eventually3. I was fine with that, I decided.

But also, this is an industry. Yes it’s art, but it’s also money, and it works best when the two can be made congruent. My first novel was weird. I like writing weird stuff. But I don’t only like writing weird stuff. So perhaps I could skew my writing towards the overlap in the Venn diagram between what I enjoy and what other people want to read (and publish).

When planning my second novel, then, a few thoughts went around my head. I wanted something that fit more comfortably within what is being published today. I identified political intrigue fantasy as a niche that I love and is very popular. Also, I wanted something stand alone but with the potential for sequels, both because agents and editors seem to like that kind of thing but also because it would give me flexibility. Also also, I wanted to further explore this fantasy setting I’d been building out for years.

The idea I developed was this: a novel about a young diplomat (with lots of room for character development) being thrust into a foreign court full of juicy intrigue, which after outlining I decided I could keep at or under 100,000 words. (By contrast, my first came in at 130,000, a length that puts many agents off.) I had a strong idea for the book’s plot and, while that plot was stand alone, it left open the option of sequels in which the same character travels to other courts on different diplomatic assignments. (And, because I’m an outliner and planner at heart, yes I do already know what those would be.)

So I outlined it and wrote it and let people read it (shout out to , one of those people) and edited it and edited it and edited it, and here we are. During the editing process, I wrote and revised my query letter and synopsis, and found they actually helped me hone in on the core of the story, which was incredibly helpful during later revision.

I found almost all the agents I’m querying through querytracker. At the end of that process, I ended up with a little shy of forty agents representing fantasy and based in the UK with whom I think my project might fit. As of this week, I started sending out my query to them.

Now, we wait. (And in the meantime, I’ll be researching and outlining the sequel.4)

The Novel

This section is intended for those curious about what I’ve written — both the novel and how I’m trying to pitch it. But, also, on the off-chance that you’re a literary agent who represents adult fantasy and is looking to expand their list, consider this an open query.

Complete at 100,000 words, DIPLOMAT’S GAMBIT is an adult fantasy, stand alone with the potential for sequels. Taking place in a setting inspired by Georgian Britain (which will be familiar to readers of my short fiction), it will appeal to fans of the political intrigue and character driven storytelling of Seth Dickson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant5 and Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire.

Mikhail Trubitskoy is a carouser, perfectly at ease wasting away his years drinking and gambling to his heart’s content. A disappointment to his father and reckless spender of the overbearing old man’s money. That is, until one night he is challenged to a duel – quite the overreaction to a little good-natured ribbing – shot, and almost killed. For his family, it’s the last straw. A profession will force him to get a hold of himself, his father decides. Mikhail chooses the least objectionable option: he becomes a diplomat.

The romance of it! Or perhaps not, as he’s immediately sent to a volatile mess of a kingdom. Lacking a king, after the last one got himself killed, and at war with their neighbour, who they accuse of orchestrating the regicide. Yet, if the killer can be found, the whole knot might be unravelled. A shame no-one’s seen the man since that fateful day. Mikhail, in a desperate bid to prove he’s not the empty-headed libertine everyone seems to believe, resolves to be the first.

With the help of his local valet, a lovelorn aristocrat, and a rather fetching ambassador’s daughter, Mikhail sketches out the outlines of a conspiracy. But with every step, the ground shifts underfoot and, if he slips, he’ll be sent home in disgrace, forever the family disappointment. That won’t happen. It can’t. He will outmanoeuvre politicians, uncover a murder, survive an assassination, unmask a conspiracy, flirt with romance, and end a war. And maybe, by the end of it all, he’ll have even made something of himself.

Sounds good, right? It’s got some really crunchy political intrigue, a central mystery driving the plot, and a whole heap of character. To blatantly toot my own horn, I really love the dialogue in this thing, in particular. Oh, and the formal balls! It’s got three set-piece balls each taking up a whole chapter where all the characters get to gather and scheme and flirt and generally make mischief. Love those things. Major inspirations are War and Peace, the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian, and Robin Hobb’s Fitz books. I hope you get to read it someday.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re interesting in following along in my querying journey, or in reading my short fiction and non-fiction, feel more than welcome to subscribe.

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I’ve been rereading Rousseau’s Confessions, an episode of which is the inspiration behind my next short story, releasing in two weeks. It roughly depicts the story of what Rousseau calls the worst thing he ever did, from the perspective of its victim. Two weeks after that, I think I’ll be indulging my French Revolutionary fascination again and discussing every constitution France instituted between 1789 and 1799. Did you know they had four in that brief period!?!

If you’re looking for a story recommendation, this piece of epistolary fiction is set in the same city as the novel, though two decades later:

Don’t know where to continue with my writing? This might help:

While he understood why he had been invited to the captains’ dinner – and it was certainly better fare than he was used to – Dimitrios would really rather have stayed away. It was just him with the three captains who made up their little convoy heading over hostile seas to the neutral Lydesi port of Obahasrand and, thus far, was less a meal than an interrogation.

‘You’ll take a drop more, Mr Kepharot?’ asked Captain A’Themi from the head of the table.

Dimitrios nodded, accepting the bottle of Kyrenian red his employer slid towards him. In his own estimation it tasted no different from the local swill he was used to, though had the same pleasant effects. He poured a glass and passed it back.

He was a young man, this Daniele A’Themi who had hired Dimitrios and his decades of experience as a gunner in the Xhodesii Republican Navy. This man who had given him the impossible task of turning a merchant ship into a fighting one, such that it could fend of enemy ships from Thema and Thasionos and lead convoys to lucrative continental ports. Young, yes, but he had done well as a merchant adventurer before war broke out – captaining his own ship, Fortune – and was by all accounts a good sailor. Still, Dimitrios didn’t quite know what to make of him.

‘Tell us, Mr Kepharot, how progresses the gun crews’ training?’

The question came from Captain Giorgion. Kestril was his ship, though he was only a hired captain rather than her owner, unlike the other two.

‘They’re coming along, sir,’ said Dimitrios. All three captains remained looking at him, as though that weren’t enough. A’Themi, in particular, with that easy smile.

‘Their speed is improving,’ he added. And, when even that seemed not to satisfy, ‘accuracy on the long sixes will come. The carronades, brought to pistol shot as they should be, can hardly miss. Speed and sailing make the difference there.’

None of which was a lie, even if it was stretching the truth like a wet hawser. The problem, of course, was the cost. It was the same problem Dimitrios had always faced in the navy, compounded by A’Themi having to make a profit on their voyage – to spend less on powder and shot and the rest than he was charging the two other ships for their protection.

Not that the navy was openhanded, but good captains – the type of gunnery focused captains Dimitrios approved of – paid for extra supplies out of pocket, knowing they would recoup it in prizes won in battle. It was why Dimitrios had always preferred to serve under rich men of the senatorial class.

Yet here he was, on a civilian ship under a merchant captain. Not enough hands – despite A’Themi doubling the ship’s usual complement – and not enough powder or time to turn them into true gunners.

‘You’re confident in Fortune’s fighting abilities, then?’ asked the last of the three captains, Brafis. A merchant adventurer like A’Themi, his ship was Sweet Winds. Not as smooth a sailor as her name implied.

‘The guns are as good as anything the Themans have,’ Dimitrios said. That was certainly no lie, no matter the quality of their crews. ‘But any ship can find itself outgunned, sir. Flight is sometimes the wisest course.’

That wasn’t what any of them wanted to hear, he could tell. Yet, any further questions were cut off as Mr Mosk, Fortune’s bosun, entered the small – though richly decorated – captain’s dining room.

‘Sirs, a windward sail on the horizon.’

‘Colours?’ asked A’Themi.

‘Kyrenian, sir, as best we can make out.’ Neutral, that meant, so long as the colours were true.

‘A warship?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What does it signify, A’Themi?’ asked Brafis.

Dimitrios guessed that he and his employer shared the same thought. It was written there on his olive countenance.

‘I don’t trust it. My contact on the Admiralty Board said the Kyrenians pulled their ships out of the western Gulf when the war broke out.’

‘False colours,’ Giorgion mused. ‘Aye, it could be.’

‘Gentlemen, you are welcome to join me on deck,’ said A’Themi, rising from his chair. All followed.

###

After the dingy cabin, Dimitrios allowed his eyes a few moments to adjust to the glorious, cloudless sky. A strong breeze rippled through his coarse beard and, up above, a few dark-winged gulls danced through the air. That morning, one had dropped dead to the deck; a dark omen. All around, the sea caressed the ship, whispering to her and stroking her sides. And, upon that ship, the crew, either busy or having the good sense to look as though they were.

They were Islanders all of them; salt water was in their blood. From the waves they had emerged and back to them they would return, sailing under the sea to the Underworld on the drowned ship Sylaph, captained by Kathor, son of the Sea King Neros. Dimitrios would crew that ship. For a dozen years and a day, one could pledge themselves to the barge of souls before making the final journey. To some, it was a dark thought. Not to Dimitrios. He would be proud to serve. To sail in death as he had in life.

But not yet, he reminded himself, making it a prayer to the Sea King and Mother Mistera and, because he was a man of war as well as of the waves, to Victorious Ashope, Queen of Generals and Maid of Battles, too.

While the captains made their way to the stern – extended to overhang the hull – Dimitrios kicked off his shoes. He only wore them at formal dinners: a sailor had to feel the deck under him. Spitting on his callused hands, he hauled himself up the mainmast ropes to the tops for a better view.

His sinewy old limbs were used to the climb. In his youth, on the frigate Javelin, the crew had traded their wine ration for a macaque in Jalasria. Lena, they’d called her, and rated her able and fed her fruits and a cup of wine at dinner. And they’d raced her up to the tops, though at first she hadn’t understood the game and got distracted, but once Dimitrios had beaten her, and she hadn’t been distracted at all, and he’d won five silver dolphins.

They’d all been sad when Lena died. Dimitrios couldn’t have beaten her any longer. He was more careful with his holds since that time he had fallen and dislocated a shoulder. Yet, he was a sure climber still and soon reached the tops, where he took a spyglass from the spotter and trained it on the distant sail. From the deck, it would still be hidden behind the horizon, except perhaps for the very tops of the masts.

Before the return climb, a brief inspection of the convoy. Fortune led, a three-masted xebec – the style favoured for ships of her size throughout the Islands – rigged in the modern style with square sails on the mainmast. From his perch above her, Dimitrios saw nothing to disapprove of.

Behind her and a little to starboard, Sweet Winds, of that same xebec style and the traditional sailing plan: lateens on all three masts. The fastest of them all on the tack, though otherwise the slowest and awkward on the manoeuvre. Finally, Kestril, a brig laid down in Daastrijn long enough ago for her age to show. The smallest, but well handled by an experienced crew.

When he returned to the deck, the captains were still debating. A’Themi spoke over the others to ask what Dimitrios had seen.

‘Three masts. Probably a corvette. About twelve miles away, three points aft of larboard beam. Kyrenian colours for certain, sir.’

‘Adjusting course?’

‘Aye.’

‘They’re just on the tack,’ said Brafis.

‘We cannot run that risk,’ Giorgion replied.

‘Sirs,’ said A’Themi, ‘I suggest you both return to your ships. We shall adjust course and see how they respond.’

‘And if they give chase?’ asked Brafis, worry entering his voice for the first time. ‘You’ll fight them off, A’Themi?’

The captain looked Brafis in the face.

‘If it comes to that, yes.’

Dimitrios rested his hands on the gun beside him, one of the four-pounder stern chasers, feeling the cold metal against his rough skin. If it came to shooting, he didn’t think much of their chances.

###

‘She’s adjusting course and gaining on us, sir,’ Dimitrios said. ‘Six knots to our five, best we can make out.’

‘Thank you, Mr Kepharot.’

The captain was in his cabin, hunched over his maps. Being used to the navy, Dimitrios was baffled by how A’Themi acted as his own sailing master and pursuer. And, absent of lieutenants, Mr Mosk and Dimitrios himself led the two watches in addition to their other duties.

‘And what manner of ship is she?’ A’Themi asked.

‘A man-of-war for certain. A corvette, and on the larger side. Four-and-twenty or eight-and-twenty guns, I’d guess. More than twice our tonnage on the broadside.’

‘Very well.’

The captain glanced back at his charts. He never questioned Dimitrios’s expertise; there was certainly that to be said for the man.

‘Mr Kepharot, ask Mr Mosk to signal Kestril and Sweet Wind. They’re to follow us as we run another point to lee.’

###

The chase – all participants now acknowledged it was a chase – sprung into action. A’Themi ordered more sail, though they all knew it was Sweet Wind that would hold them back, especially with the wind behind them. If the captain had considered leaving the slower ship behind, he had yet to voice the thought.

The pursuing ship dropped all pretence and strung up Theman colours. The crowned spear, gold against a wine dark sea. Thema, Xhodesi’s arch-rival these three centuries, who had forced them into this latest of wars by blockading Atkorini and firing upon and capturing poor, brave Ioanna.

Dimitrios spared a glance for his captain. What did he think of that? A’Themi was of Theman descent himself, as the name he proudly bore implied. His grandfather, Dimitrios remembered. Were two generations enough to adopt new loyalties? If patriotism didn’t wed him to the other ships, he might abandon them to save his own. For a merchant adventurer, his ship being taken as a prize would mean the end of his livelihood. Even good patriots would have to reckon with that reality.

While he thought, Dimitrios wasted time inspecting all fourteen guns. Two four-pound chasers at the prow and an answering pair at the stern. Along either side, four six-pounders and, there in the middle, a twelve-pound carronade. Snub-nosed as bull-fighting dogs, the carronades were, and just as aggressive. Any faith Dimitrios had in damaging another vessel was placed in those two guns, able to throw a weight equal to three long guns their same size.

‘Are they up to the task, Mr Kepharot?’

Dimitrios started at his employer’s voice and turned sharply to show his respect. He thumbed his cap. Not a true salute, of course. He wasn’t in the navy anymore. Too old, his captain had told him. More vigorous men were needed in times of war. He’d been replaced by his mate, who he’d been training for half a dozen years to do just that, though surely not so soon. And then A’Themi had come along, offering him double the navy wage.

‘Sir?’

‘The guns, Mr Kepharot.’

‘Broadside to broadside, we won’t have a chance. The best crew in the Gulf wouldn’t.’

‘I know, Mr Kepharot.’

‘When they close to within a mile, I’ll try the stern chasers against their rigging. We might get lucky. Immobilise them.’

‘Or they might, with us.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘It’s a risk I’d rather not take. Tell me, Mr Kepharot, do you know any navy signals?’

‘Sir?’

The only ship to signal was their pursuer, which wouldn’t respond to Xhodesii signals even if they had wanted to communicate with her.

‘That ship, Mr Kepharot,’ A’Themi nodded towards the corvette, a slightly larger smudge on the horizon than it had been, ‘will overtake us. She’ll put on more speed than we can. Certainly more than Sweet Wind. We could break up the convoy, so only one of us is captured. But that won’t do. So, we’ll have to force her to give up the chase.’

‘She has no reason to, sir.’

‘No, not yet she doesn’t. I’d like to adjust course two points windward.’

‘So she’ll catch us sooner?’

‘Exactly. Now, why would we do that?’

A’Themi smiled to himself. An inviting expression and a conspiratorial one. Dimitrios was caught between confusion and an unaccountable desire to be included in the conspiracy.

‘I don’t know, sir. Why would we?’

‘Well that’s what her captain will be asking. At the same time, I’d like some signals. Hailing a friendly warship and informing her of our pursuit, something like that. The real signals would be better but, if you don’t know them, believable counterfeits would do. The Themans, we’ll have to hope, won’t know the difference.’

‘But sir, who would we be signalling?’

A’Themi winked and waved a hand towards the open seas.

‘Our reinforcements, of course. At least, so far as our pursuer knows.’

Dimitrios was dumbfounded.

‘You want to bluff her, sir? This is war, not cards.’

‘She played a trick on us, with her false colours. I’d merely like to play one back. Mr Kepharot, if you see another course, please tell me. Your experience is perhaps my most valuable asset at the present moment.’

Against his better judgement, pride warmed Dimitrios’s heart.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, saluting properly before he realised he had done it. ‘Short of throwing the guns overboard and abandoning Sweet Wind—’

‘I’m a man of my word. And those guns didn’t come cheap.’

‘Yes, sir. Then… we should try your ruse.’

‘Glad you agree,’ A’Themi said, before leaning in close and dropping his voice. ‘Because I can already tell Brafis won’t like it.’ He patted Dimitrios’s arm and went off calling for Mosk.

###

As Mr Mosk ordered the crew through the adjustments to rope and sail, Dimitrios stitched together his final flag. The navy used a pure red flag for distress, he remembered that. In all honesty, most signals were improvised and unclear, not that the civilians – or other navies – would know that. He had devised what he decided was eminently believable: the red of distress, then a pure blue, then one of half white and half green.

It meant nothing, of course. Besides the red, the colours had been dictated by his materials, which were a few bolts of dyed cloth Brafis had agreed to part with, after A’Themi had gone over in his barge to explain his plan to the other captains. A’Themi had agreed to pay him for the cloth, if it worked.

Still, three flags hoisted together. Anyone could see that was a signal and, if the Themans knew any Xhodesii signals, it would be that red one. It was the best he could do.

Dimitrios handed the flag over for A’Themi’s inspection. The captain smiled.

‘I’d believe them myself,’ he declared. For some reason, that was a comfort.

The crew snickered. They approved of the trick and, in their minds, it had already succeeded. It would prove the Themans stupid and cowardly which, after all, was their national character. That and servility to their prince and imperiousness to all else.

The flags were tied and run up the mast. They caught the wind and flew eagle proud.

‘You may fire, Mr Kepharot,’ said A’Themi.

‘Thank you, sir. Fire!’

At the command, match kissed touchhole and a larboard gun, filled with powder though no shot, kicked back in a fury. Like the flags, it meant nothing. But Dimitrios remembered that guns sometimes accompanied signals. It would add to the performance, A’Themi had decided.

A cheer went up from the men. A’Themi joined them and laughed, but his eyes – hidden to most – turned back to the Theman ship. Dimitrios saw no humour in those eyes.

The crew returned to their tasks or their hammocks. Not all were so carefree. For a quarter hour – Dimtrios kept an eye on his watch, and saw the captain doing the same – nothing. Every moment, the gap between the convoy and their pursuer narrowed. Imperceptibly, yet undeniably.

In that gap, a spray disturbed the water, and then a whale broke the surface, pirouetting and crashing back down, momentarily blocking sight of the other ship. A second leviathan followed the first, in play and in chase.

Dimitrios gasped at the omen. If only they had a priest, to interpret it. Was it for them, or the Themans? Two whales could be the two dolphins of Xhodesi, representing the twin Musi in whose honour their city had been founded. Yes, that was it. It was for them. Protecting them. Dimitrios took heart.

Perhaps the omen was the decisive factor aboard the pursuing ship. Within minutes, it began to turn. Three points to lee, or there abouts. A few sails disappeared. The chase, given up. Dimitrios gasped in disbelief. The crew roared.

###

A’Themi called the other captains to a celebratory supper. Thankfully, Dimitrios was not invited. Instead, he took his wine ration on deck with Mr Mosk, who had the watch.

‘Did you think it would work?’ Dimitrios asked. He took a gulp of the wine.

The other man laughed. He was younger than Dimitrios, of an age with A’Themi, though with a face more weatherbeaten than the captain’s and his hair pulled back into a sailor’s tail.

‘I’ve sailed with him these four years, ever since his father bought the ship and died while waiting for us to return from our maiden voyage. I’ve seen him do more with less than this feat today.’

‘Aye, but…’

‘But?’

‘No. I’d offend.’

‘Offend, then.’

‘That father. Was he born in Thema?’

Mosk bristled, as Dimitrios knew he would.

‘He wasn’t. He was born in Xhodesi to a Xhodesii mother, as was the captain.’

‘I heard the captain lament the war,’ Dimitrios said.

‘You don’t?’

‘I was a navy sailor. I don’t know what to do with peace. Besides, it’s the Themans. Sooner or later, there’s always war with Thema.’

‘You’re on a merchant ship now, guns notwithstanding. War’s bad for business.’

‘But he would fight Themans? He wouldn’t fear upsetting his ancestors?’

Xhodesii ancestry down the maternal line was well enough, but everyone knew the angriest spirits came from the father’s side.

‘Aye, he’d fight them,’ Mosk confirmed. ‘He’d say we aren’t all so different, us children of the Five Islands. Same tongue, more or less. Same gods, more or less. But he’d remind us of the libation he poured to Markomonos, Father of the Republic, before we left, and that he is a son of Xhodesi, and he’d shoot and hack and drown those Themans dead.’

‘You think well of him.’

‘You will too, if you give him time. He has something. He’s the kind of man sailors like to follow.’

‘And lubbers too,’ Dimitrios agreed. Had he not also felt that pull? The kind of easy charisma the rhetoricians claimed they could teach, but not all needed teaching.

Gazing across the serene water, Dimitrios drained his wine. It mattered not. They would arrive in Obahasrand the next day, if the wind held. It was unlikely they would see another—

His eye caught on a flash of white.

‘Up in the tops,’ he called. ‘See you a sail to stern?’

No reply.

‘Tops!’ Mosk shouted. ‘If I find you sleeping, you’ll swim home.’

Which, if they had been dozing, was enough to start them awake. There was a cry and a man slid down the ropes.

‘It’s her, I think, sirs,’ said the slacking spotter. ‘The Theman. She’s back.’

###

‘We need to hold her off ‘til nightfall,’ said A’Themi. All three captains were back at the stern, watching the enemy ship crest the horizon. ‘Adjust course and make it look as though we are making for the Lydesi coast by the shortest route.’

‘Make it look like?’ said Giorgion.

‘You have another plan, sir?’ Dimitrios asked.

‘We need to lose her in the dark. But first, to survive until then.’

The ships put on more sail and turned to lee, picking up a knot of speed as the wind filled their canvas. Still, the Theman gained. She was a beautiful sailor. A sail plan not dissimilar to Fortune’s, though scaled up to a larger ship. One of the Theman new four-and-twenty gunners, Dimitrios decided, so feared as cruisers, though they were as yet untested in battle.

Brafis sent word from Sweet Wind. Any more sail and she risked breaking a mast. The other ships would have to slow or else leave her behind. There was a question in that statement. A’Themi answered it, ordering the sails trimmed.

‘Wait, sir,’ Dimitrios said, careful not to be overheard. It would never do to question the captain’s authority.

‘Sir,’ he continued, ‘you’re used to a small merchant crew. But we have three score sailors aboard.’

‘Therefore, Mr Kepharot?’

Dimitrios had feared angering the man, but his words were carried only an intense curiosity.

‘Sir, in the navy, in such a situation, we might order extra men into the boats, and have them row to tug the lagging ship.’

A’Themi cracked a smile. ‘You’re correct, Mr Kepharot. I’m unused to so many hands. Mr Mosk! Belay that order – we have a better solution.’

The boats were ordered over, with Dimitrios as their leader. Rowing over and securing cables took agonising minutes, but soon they were pulling Sweet Wind along by the strength of their backs, adding another crucial half-knot to her pace.

‘Pull, lads! Pull!’ Dimitrios shouted.

He’d taken an oar with the rest of them. He felt the sea resist as he propelled against it and tasted the salt spray on his lips. The water was his strength. Always had been. He kept pulling.

The sun was already low, a mere handspan over the waves, throwing brilliant oranges and pinks into the sky. They just had to keep going until dark.

So they rowed and they rowed. Dimitrios couldn’t see the pursuing ship, obscured as it was by Sweet Wind before him. He wondered if she had put on more sail. If, even now, she was gaining too fast. The first he would know might be the scream of her chasers into Sweet Wind’s rigging.

He couldn’t allow that. So he pulled, though his shoulders burned and his back ached. He let his mind wander away from the moment with its discomfort, to settle in memory. On other desperate moments. On the boom of cannon and crack of timber and cries of men. Compared to that, rowing was nothing. He redoubled his efforts.

The sun met the horizon and sank ever lower. The sky darkened. No lanterns were lit aboard Sweet Wind, nor on the ships ahead of her. All part of A’Themi’s plan. The moon was a sliver, her eye turned away in horror or indifference. Dimitrios could make out little beyond the confines of the boat.

He ordered the rowing to cease. They had done it – night had fallen and the Theman ship hadn’t caught them despite all its grasping. They rowed back to Fortune and came aboard with as little noise as they could.

‘Quiet on deck,’ said Mosk as Dimitrios finished his clamber.

‘How close?’ Dimitrios asked.

He strained his eyes. Beyond Fortune, Kestril and Sweet Wind were only visible by how their sails blocked out the stars. Even further and there were a few dancing lights. Their pursuer, that would be, but Dimitrios couldn’t make out the distance.

‘Two miles. A close-run thing. But we made it.’

‘And now we merely must adjust course, staying in convoy, without sound or light.’

‘Aye. Only that.’

It was a task that called only for those most intimately familiar with Fortune and each other. The old crew, who had plied the seas with A’Themi before the war. A tight cadre that made up a third of their present number. The rest were shooed below deck, save Dimitrios.

They worked without orders or encouragement, all in darkness. Like Sylaph, the drowned ship, it was, for the sea permitted no light so deep and dead men had no voices. Dimitrios felt a longing to be counted amongst those few. A’Themi had the helm. He turned to windward.

Fortune creaked as she went, the waves lapping at her flanks. Without lights on any of the three ships, the Theman surely couldn’t see them. Wouldn’t know when, or if, or in what direction, they turned.

They completed the turn, back in the direction of Obahasrand, their destination. Kestril and Sweet Wind followed with their own manoeuvres. Behind them, the Theman’s bobbing lights remained ignorant and maintained their course.

Dimitrios stayed on deck, watching those lights pass them, not much more than a mile away, and keep going. The lights grew more distant, off on the starboard quarter. Once more, they’d escaped.

###

Feeling the exhaustion of his limbs, Dimitrios slept for the hour that remained until he had to be up with the middle watch. No sign of their pursuer in the darkness. Dimitrios ordered the lanterns lit and kept an eye to stern the whole watch, before he was relieved by Mr Mosk to his hammock. He fell back into exhausted sleep, awakened only when the watch changed once again.

The day was good, the wind strong. They would make it to port, before it was out. Captain A’Themi was sure of it. So long as the Neros deigned it to be so, Dimitrios reminded him. A’Themi seemed to care little what the gods thought, though he poured the Sea King’s morning libation overboard all the same.

Finally with the time to spare, Dimitrios put some of the gun crews through their paces. They had no powder or shot to waste on training, but the crews could still put on a dummy show of it: pulling back the guns and acting their roles and pushing them forwards. Budding dramatists, all of them. They’d certainly be better on stage than behind a gun. A stroke of luck, then, that those skills would not be needed.

At noon, A’Themi took his observations as the watch changed. It merely gave Dimitrios the time to inspect all the guns, and maybe give them a polish. Around him, the crew tottered along, swabbing and making a few adjustments to the sails. And then they weren’t. Dimitrios noticed it all at once, that the bustle had stopped and a silence descended. A low murmur replaced it.

He cast his eyes around. A’Themi and Mosk held a private conference. Dimitrios intruded upon it.

‘The spotters think they’ve seen something, Mr Kepharot,’ said Captain A’Themi.

Only one thing would have caused such a stir. Mosk retrieved the bosun’s horn and called across to Kestril, asking what their own spotters could see. Sweet Wind was consulted too. After a few minutes, all three ships concurred. Their pursuer had returned.

‘Well, it wouldn’t take a scholar to guess we had resumed our previous course, once her captain recognised that we had slipped the noose,’ A’Themi mused. ‘Still, I’d hoped for a little more time.’

‘We’ll be in Obahasrand by evenfall, sir,’ said Mosk.

‘Indeed we would,’ A’Themi replied, ‘if it weren’t for her overtaking us first.’

‘Another plan, sir?’ Dimitrios asked with a smile.

‘No, Mr Kepharot.’ There was no hint of mirth on A’Themi’s face. ‘I fear not.’

All hands on deck – they knew the routine by now. The captain knew his ship well, and could stretch every bit of speed out of yet. She sailed well with the wind just a few points off her starboard beam. But, of course, it wasn’t Fortune that the Theman would catch first.

They began to pull away from Kestril. Sweet Wind fell even further behind. Dimitrios heard A’Themi swear and blushed at the blasphemies. The captain asked for the bosun’s horn.

‘Maintain course for Obahasrand,’ he shouted to Kestril, where they would pass the message along. ‘We shall lead her off.’

Dimitrios was stunned to hear it. What could they do against the Theman ship? Nothing, of course. Except, perhaps, distract her long enough for the others to finish their voyage. A’Themi intended to sacrifice his ship, then. And his crew. And himself. To end his livelihood, and for what? For patriotism? For pride? For a promise?

Dimitrios’s heart clenched. But it sang too. He was sure that he had never served under a man quite like Daniele A’Themi.

Yet there was no more time for such thoughts. It was all hands again, manoeuvring Fortune such that she dropped behind the rest of the convoy, her course a little more to lee.

‘Mr Kepharot,’ A’Themi said with a sigh, clasping his gunner’s shoulder. ‘If you would be so kind, please inspect the magazine. We shall soon have need of it.’

The Theman increased sail but maintained her course, still pursuing the two slower and more vulnerable quarries. The captain took the situation in hand, slowing Fortune further. If their hunter refused to engage them, they could cross her prow and rake her mercilessly. Even against an inferior ship, that was a concern.

She recognised it, the chasing ship, and altered course. She’d go for Fortune first, and hope to swoop back in on the others before they reached port. On Fortune, their job was to ensure she didn’t have the time. They wouldn’t survive long, however. They couldn’t, against a ship that outclassed them so.

‘A sail! A sail!’

The cry came from the tops and a sailor followed it, hurrying down. Burning his hands on the ropes, surely.

‘Sir!’ the sailor cried, panting. A’Themi held up a hand and he came to a halt, catching his breath. ‘Sir, a sail on the horizon. Three points off larboard bow.’

‘Did you see anything else, man?’ A’Themi asked.

Anything to confirm it as friend or foe, he meant.

‘Three sails. A warship. Bigger than that one.’ He meant the Theman. ‘And we’re broad on her starboard bow. That’s all, sir.’

A’Themi dismissed them all, but called Dimitrios and Mosk to him.

‘If they’re friendly, they’re deliverance, sir,’ said Mosk.

‘If they’re not, our situation cannot deteriorate much further,’ A’Themi added. ‘We’ll make for her. Try to signal. Mr Kepharot, fire a larboard gun. Let us get their attention. Then, perhaps your flags could do with another outing.’

The gun fired and the flags flew. A few minutes of strained staring later, they all saw it. That ship, though still so far away, began to turn. And, a little after that, the even more welcome news. Dimitrios got a good look at her. A frigate, she was. More than that, they could all see the flag she flew. Two golden dolphins against a black sea. She was Xhodesii. The crew cheered and Dimitrios joined them. A friendly ship, and moving to help.

The Theman reacted not at all.

‘They seem unconcerned,’ Dimitrios noted to A’Themi. ‘Despite all our signals.’

The captain laughed, drawing confusion from his gunner.

‘Don’t you see, Mr Kepharot?’ he said. ‘They think we’re playing the same trick a second time. They think they are calling our bluff.’

Their pursuer was closer, but chasing them, fighting for every inch of gain. Their saviour, by contrast, was moving towards them even as they moved towards her. They would meet first and could both fall upon the hapless Theman.

‘Sir, I recognise her!’ said Dimitrios. ‘Tirasos, one of our two-and-thirties. Captain Disoulis has her.’

‘Tirasos,’ A’Themi repeated in a whisper. ‘Hail to you, Tirasos.’

Most of an hour passed, before the Theman showed activity. She had spotted Tirasos and realised her predicament. She turned, back towards the fleeing Kestril and Sweet Wind, still on the horizon. A’Themi wouldn’t let them. Nor, it seemed, would Captain Disoulis.

The ships arced through the water, circling like wolves. Tirasos went straight for the Theman, on a course that could expose her to raking fire when they were close enough, but closed the gap as fast as possible. Fortune remained more cautious, ensuring she could cover the two fleeing ships. Yet still, she was the first to fire.

Fortune was ahead of the Theman and held the weather gauge. The stern chaser on the starboard side had a shot, Dimitrios decided. He sighted it himself and ordered it fired.

The ball skimmed the water once, twice, but missed, perhaps fifty feet to the Theman’s larboard and a little short. They reloaded the gun and fired again, to similar effect.

A’Themi called hard to lee, threatening to rake their enemy. She turned the other way, hoping to slip past, but brought herself closer to Tirasos, almost within gunshot. And, Dimitrios saw, allowing Fortune and the Theman a broadside at each other. He took the chance with glee.

The carronades would be useless with almost a mile still separating them, but he had crews at each of the four starboard long guns, primed and ready.

‘Into their rigging, lads! Wait for the wave the crest!’

The four guns fired, one after the other, throwing up a cloud of smoke that obscured their enemy. Dimitrios peered through it. Three balls missed – two short, one side – but one smashed into the Theman, taking her just above the waterline. Not the rigging, but damage nonetheless.

And then, of course, the Theman answered. Dimitrios had no time to count the flashes but guessed at ten. Each would belong to a gun of higher calibre than Fortune’s. After the flashes and smoke, the crack. And, after that, the impact.

Dimitrios threw himself to the deck. Around him, the crew braced as best they could. There was spray and splinters and a scream before Dimitrios pulled himself off the deck to assess it all.

One ball had blown away some of their rigging, but nothing essential. Another had landed on deck, torn away a crewman’s head – they would have to identify him later – and bounced off into the sea. The rest had missed. Even still, Fortune couldn’t take many more lashings like that.

Yet, the Theman’s turn had finally brought her into range of Tirasos. Their compatriot fired her chasers and began to turn before the Theman could rake her. She still suffered a broadside but, only a minute later, could return with her own. Dimitrios couldn’t see the damage. He prayed it was considerable.

With the two larger ships engaged, and Tirasos so outsizing her opponent, A’Themi could have retired his ship with honour. Instead, he ordered them to close the distance, a look between inspiration and mania on his face.

‘Mr Kepharot, let us see the carronades in action!’ he shouted.

A tack brought them up behind the Theman, half a mile away and gaining. The enemy ship had hastily pulled in sail, to protect them from Tirasos’s guns. All the way, Dimitrios had the prow chasers firing, though they had to weather counterfire from the Theman’s stern. Below those stern guns, Dimitrios could read her name with his spyglass. Hrakion. A thing lost its power, once named. All knew that.

They drew up to Hrakion’s starboard quarter, easily within musket shot, while Tirasos hammered her on the larboard side. The broadside was ready. Dimitrios gave the order.

The long guns fired. It was difficult for them to miss. But in sound and in effect, they were nothing to the carronade. It fired last, closing the opera, a great boom that allowed no other noise. The ball went high, into the rigging.

No, not just the rigging. It struck the mizzenmast a powerful blow, throwing splinters the size of limbs every which way, a maelstrom of deadly spears. As for the mizzen itself, it creaked and it complained and it gave out, crashing forwards into the mainmast, gathering up the rigging, and throwing everything after it as it rolled into the sea.

It was too much for any ship to bear: outnumbered and outclassed, with a mast in the water and no hope for reinforcement. Hrakion struck her colours.

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Thank you for reading. In the confusion of travel I apparently forgot what week it was, so this should have gone out last week. Alas. The result is that my next post will come out in just one week. After that, all else being equal, back to the regular schedule.

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Like all my naval fiction, this is a love letter to Patrick O’Brian, one of my absolute favourite writers. It’s also the first of a few stories I want to write following the exploits of Daniele A’Themi — one of my oldest characters, though not one who had appeared in my short fiction before — during the Gulf Sea War. This story takes place in the first few months of that war, and in doing so also functions as a soft sequel to this story, my first ever foray into naval fiction and the first story I ever posted on substack:

Don’t know where to continue with my writing? This might help:

Fantasy and sci-fi love politics. Intrigue and succession and all the rest have become staples of the genres, and that’s great! I love this stuff: I’m a political anorak with an international relations degree, for crying out loud. The question of how we might organise ourselves politically, economically, socially, and so on in different, invented situations is at the core of my interest in these genres.

But, with how prevalent politics has become in these genres, sometimes it falls short of the mark. Mostly commonly, by showing us the thousandth example of a generic monarchy with a good house and an evil house warring over the throne. So, with my experience as a writer and my academic background, I’d like to share my own approach in the hope that it might help other writers in this sphere.

This is planned as the first of two articles. This one will focus on governments, which is to say institutions and structures. In the sequel, I’ll dive more into politics, by which I mean the people, factions, and ideas that populate those institutions.

Now, I’m not going to give you a crash-course political science education. Frankly, modern political science is all but useless in questions of wordbuilding governments for genre fiction. Why? Well, modern political science exists to analyse modern politics and modern governments. The problem with that is almost every modern state either is or claims to be a liberal democracy. That is considered the default and the style of governance than modern political science focuses on studying.

There are a few states that don’t fall into this category, a little more than a dozen all told: communist states or non-constitutional monarchies or confessional republics. Despite these exceptions, modern political science focuses on a very particular kind of governance and so cares a lot about things like the three branches of government or checks and balances. Modern concepts, in other words, developed by the likes of Montesquieu during the Enlightenment.

What we need is a more widely applicable framework for all governments everywhere that we might wish to analyse and worldbuild. And, for this, I’m going to fall back on Rousseau’s model from The Social Contract, modified for our needs.

Rousseau calls the authority of government ‘princely power’ and (book 3, chapter 3) classifies different governments with the question of how many people hold that power. This is, in essence, Rousseau building on Aristotle, and allows him to divide all governments in monarchies (in which one person holds princely power), aristocracies (in which more than one but fewer than half of people do), and democracies (in which over half of the people do). For Rousseau’s purposes, only direct democracies count as a ‘democracy’, whereas our modern representative democracies would be a form of aristocracy, as the majority of citizens are merely private individuals and only a small minority are directly involved in wielding princely power.

This is a useful start, but what Rousseau then further asks is how these people got their power. Though he looks mostly at inheritance and election, we could also think about other appointment mechanisms — even to being chosen by lot. Whatever the mechanism, governments can then be further divided along these lines. So, a representative democracy can, under this framework, be identified as an elective aristocracy: a system in which a group of people are elected to the position of holding princely power. Ancien régime France was a hereditary monarchy, whereas Poland under the Golden Liberty was an elective one.

This is a useful beginning, and creates a framework that is flexible enough to be widely applicable. First, we ask who holds power. Then, we ask how they attain that power.

But there’s something else: a crucial fact about all governments everywhere, which is that they are made up of more than merely one institution. No individual and no institution governs alone. Instead, all governments are made up of a network of institutions sharing power, sometimes working together and sometimes at odds. To quote Rousseau: ‘Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a simple form of government. A single leader must have subordinate magistrates; a government of the people must have a leader.’ This will inevitably lead to a mixing of these different structures and it’s here that governmental worldbuilding can get really interesting.

To look back at ancien régime — pre-revolutionary — France, for example, we see much more than merely a hereditary king. Royal ministers and the bureaucracy that supported them held some independent power along the lines of an appointed aristocracy. The parlements, whose members were hereditary aristocrats (though new ones could be appointed by the king) were courts with some legislative authority. Local royal governors called intendants, who at the provincial level acted as appointed monarchs. The conflicts of these institutions are at the heart of the early French Revolution, but that nuance is lost if we merely look at the institution that technically holds the highest sovereign authority.

Analysing our own liberal democracies under this system, we have elected aristocracies that make up our legislative branches. Appointed aristocrats form the judiciary and bureaucracy. In parliamentary systems, the executive is an aristocracy appointed by the legislative. In presidential ones, it’s an elected monarchy. And these structures are often replicated again at a more local level, creating the federalism of states like the US, Germany, and India, or the asymmetric devolution we see in the UK and Spain. On top of all that, we sometimes use referenda, which are a form of direct democracy.

Or, to turn back to genre fiction, we have Dune’s system. Before Paul takes control, princely power in the galaxy is split largely between the Padishah Emperor, the Landsraad, and CHOAM. The Padishah Emperor is a hereditary monarch. The Landsraad is a hereditary aristocracy made up of the heads of the great and minor houses. CHOAM is a publicly traded company with a state-backed monopoly on trade, functioning like a plutocratic (rule by wealth) aristocracy in which the shareholders are those same heads of the great and minor houses, along with the emperor.

What Dune does so well is — amongst other things — show how these institutions evolved through particular groups attaining power, after which their power became institutionalised. The Landsraad wasn’t invented because the emperors just thought it was such a good idea, it was invented to regulate the interactions between the emperor and the already powerful houses — powerful through their control of planets and nuclear weapons and shares in CHOAM. This is similar to how parliaments were created in feudal European societies, to represent the already existing power of the nobility (who controlled land and military force), the church (which controlled land and held spiritual authority), and the wealthier inhabitants of cities, like merchants and guild masters (who controlled trade and what passed for industry).

If we take a broader view of ‘government’ — not merely looking at the formal government but at other institutions that regulate the political, economic, and social system — we would also have to contend with the Spacing Guild and Bene Gesserit. These powerful factions can influence the government’s institutions but are also influenced by it and, just like with the houses, we can see where their power comes from. (Namely, the Spacing Guild’s monopoly on space travel and the Bene Gesserit’s combination of religious authority, extreme mastery of human capabilities, and self-perpetuating influence in every other power centre in the galaxy.)

We’ll discuss this more in the article on politics and factions and people and so on, but it’s important to note for worldbuilding governments how government institutions are often merely reflective of already existing power. No governments ever really form ex-nihilo from the forehead of The Legislator (the term Rousseau uses for precisely this kind of guy, the Solons and James Madisons of the world), but instead builds on what came before it and changes to accommodate new centres of power. When a government refuses to do so, the disenfranchised group will often wield that power to force their way in.

So, to understand what kind of government institutions might emerge in the society you are worldbuilding, you’ll first have to understand where underlying power lies in that society. That means understanding what that power is — either harder power land or money or soldiers or a particular resource or magic, or softer more charismatic or ideological influence — and who holds it. (And even how firm their grasp on it is.) Once you know that, you’ll be able to think about what institutions might be created to represent them.

Otherwise, they they might coopt existing institutions to do the same. A mostly elective government in a society with a strong plutocratic element might see, to use an entirely random example, a heavy influx of money into the democratic process in an attempt to coopt it into representing the interests of the plutocrats. In ancien régime France, to use a similar idea, the newly wealthy would buy their way into the aristocracy to coopt the institutions that had already been created to represent that previously powerful section of society and take advantage of the special status they had carved out for themselves.

New institutions are not always created to include a powerful group into government, but sometimes instead because the existing institutions see an advantage to creating them. Local governors or local autonomy, for example, will always emerge in states that lack fast communication, merely because it’s unfeasible to directly govern that which you cannot directly communicate with. This is true both in the pre-modern societies of fantasy (where a horse might be the fastest means of transport1) and of far-future sci-fi empires (limited in communications by the speed of light), though of course writers can always create their own fantasy/sci-fi reasons why faster communication is possible, which would therefore radically change the structure of the government. New institutions might otherwise be created to lighten the administrative load on existing ones (particularly when the government is expanding in scope) or as part of the power-jostling of those existing institutions. (Maybe the king creates a new council to undermine the power of the old one he’s in conflict with.)

Once you know what these institutions are, who’s in them, how people attain power within them, and how and why they emerged, the final question is to ask what discrete powers they have. Again, the most common model today to understand that question is the three-branches system — one institution to make laws, another to carry them out, and a final one to interpret them. This might be a useful framework to your worldbuilding, but historically it’s not particularly common and therefore isn’t something you should limit yourself to.

Instead, an institutions power might be limited to a particular area or group of people — like the Ottoman millet system, which allowed religious minorities to be governed by their own laws. It might have power only over specified areas of policy. It might have the power to govern, or it might merely exist as a chamber of discussion and scrutiny, perhaps with some veto power over other institutions. Its powers might be a combination of various things, all grafted together.

The hidden ingredient in all of this is, as stated earlier, that governments evolve. They’re never static; always changing as the society they govern does. This means that you won’t only have to think about the groups that are currently powerful and the institutions it currently makes sense to create, but about all those that used to be powerful and have already been created, which might cling onto that role in government long after their power has waned. The British House of Lords, for example, gave a seat to all hereditary peers until 1999, and allowed 92 of them to keep their seats until this very year, long after the power of the hereditary peerage faded.

Considering all of this, you’ll be able to create an intricate network of institutions interacting with, and indeed against, each other, forming an interesting and layered governmental system: the perfect backdrop to some good old political intrigue. Indeed, these institutions themselves, and their tensions in particular, might help inform your intrigue and add to your plot.

Two final pieces of advice. First, the best way to really understand how to craft a government is to learn about modern and historical ones, and think about how those systems might have to change to fit your world. In all worldbuilding, my ultimate advice is to pick up a history book and just get immersed in how fascinating and complex humans and the things we create are.

But second, don’t catch worldbuilder’s disease. If your world doesn’t need complicated, multi-layered governments — if your plot has nothing to do with them — then there’s no need to waste hours crafting them. Worldbuilding for its own sake is fun (or, at least, I think so) but if you’re just trying to create what you need to tell your story, which is usually the better advice, then your time might be better spent elsewhere. A generic monarchy might work just fine for you and, if kept semi-vague with perhaps a few references to other institutions you know nothing about except their name, the reader might even fill in the gaps and assume you have some big complicated system just out of sight. We’ve all got to take that approach with some of our worldbuilding — we can’t know the name of every village in every country in the world — and it’s absolutely fine if this is where you want to take that approach in your story that ultimately has nothing to do with politics anyway.

Yet, for me personally, governments are one of my favourite parts of worldbuilding. My own worldbuilding disease is terminal and — oh no! — it looks like it’s contagious. So get out there, have fun with it, and create something unique for your characters to explore.

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Thank you for reading. I made most of these points in an earlier essay on the topic on my website, but decided that needed to be re-written and expanded for substack, which is what you’ve just read. I really hope these questions and ideas help you.

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In two weeks, I’ll be releasing my next short story, which should finally be Fortune’s Favour which I failed to finish for my previous slot but is pitched as a cat-and-mouse chase on the high seas. We’re following the mice as they use every trick in the book to evade their pursuers. Two weeks after that will be my next non-fiction which, excitingly, will be a discussion of my return to the query trenches.

On the face of it, that’s an absurd thing to say. Sanderson is currently the biggest writer of adult epic fantasy1 and this is his biggest, most epic series. If any series of novels is the flagship of the fantasy genre right now — like The Wheel of Time was in its heyday — it is this one. Of course it’s fantasy!

And yes, it is. But, strangely, it doesn’t feel like fantasy. Not to me, at least. Something in the vibe, in the aesthetics, is discordant with the genre I know — something I can feel in my bones. Something that makes me look at an epic-length series based in a constructed world full of magic and gods and say, entirely seriously, that at some point it stopped feeling like this genre I know and love so deeply. So, let’s try to understand what and why that is.

But first: none of this is a criticism of this series or its writer. ‘Fantasy’ is a genre label. Literature isn’t good based on the degree to which it conforms to that label. So no, this isn’t in itself a criticism of the series. Instead, it’s an attempt to understand what we mean when we talk about fantasy, moving away from surface level boxes to tick (magic, secondary world, etc.) and towards what I’m broadly calling the ‘feel’ of the writing.

Beginning an interrogation into this intuition, the first and strangest thing to say is that this wasn’t always the case. The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance both felt very fantasy to me. It wasn’t until Oathbringer that this began to change, before I really identified the feeling while reading Rhythm of War.2 What’s up with that?

Something has changed as this series has progressed which fundamentally altered how it feels to read. No, not just something, but an overlapping cluster of somethings that are at times difficult to tease out and individually identify. Nonetheless, let’s attempt to do just that.

Prose

When talking about Sanderson, the first thing that gets brought up by critics is, usually, the prose. This is a starting point, and it’s a useful one. I have lots of thoughts on Sanderson’s prose most of which are best kept for another day, but a few are relevant here.

Sanderson talks about aiming for ‘clear’ prose. Prose that is unobtrusive and readable. To use his own metaphor, some prose is like a stained glass window, where the window itself is beautiful irrespective of what you can see through it, whereas he aims for a clear, clean, transparent window that exists only to show you what’s beyond. At its best, his prose falls away until you’re hardly even aware that you’re reading. Pages fly by, never fatiguing until your eyes start streaming and you realise it’s 3am and you’ve gotta be at work in six hours so you should probably try sleeping for a few of them.

However, Sanderson doesn’t always attain that ideal. Elantris, his first novel, has noticeably clunky and flabby prose. Reading it with any kind of eye towards editing will drive you up the wall. It’s a window with such shoddy craftsmanship that all you can see are the scratches. After Elantris, this changes. Mistborn era one, the early Stormlight books, and everything else he released during that period were the closest he ever came to achieving his ‘clear window’ ideal.

But then it changed again! Sanderson had always had a ‘problem’ — if I can use such a subjective term — with Whedon-esque banter, out-of-place terminology, and his particular brand of wordplay. It’s in all his books. Warbreaker suffers the most from it, but it’s heavily present from Shallan in Stormlight as well. At its best, it’s usually just not very funny (to me). At worst, it completely breaks emersion as a very modern turn of phrase shows up. The infamous ‘homicidal hattrick’ gag from Mistborn, for example. While this has always been present, it’s been getting more prevalent in his more recent novels.

Here’s the thing: this is the opposite of ‘clear window’ prose. It is a smudge on the window. Maybe you can see through it, but you have to squint, and all of a sudden you’re aware of the window in a way you weren’t before. Fantasy, in particular, carries prose expectations. The prose doesn’t have to be archaic or purple, but it does have to feel like you’re reading something fantastical. There needs to be something to it that carries the fantastical vibe. The Worm Ouroboros is written entirely in Jacobean English and, in sections where it quotes from letters using long abandoned spelling from before the Great Vowel Shift, is genuinely hard to parse. More modern fantasy tends to merely dop that which feels overtly of our particular time. Either way, if you could use the exact same prose in a contemporary thriller, it feels off. It begins to draw attention to itself, even though it’s not trying to.

I have thoughts on why I think this change occurred, but those thoughts are besides the point for today. The point is the effect this creates. When Kaladin is being referred to as a psychiatrist within the text of the book and the characters are talking like they’re in the MCU, it all starts to feel very different from fantasy as we have come to understand it.

Prose suffuses everything in a novel and this is a crucial element to the unfantasy feel, but it’s not the totality. All else, nonetheless, is compounded by the prose.

They’re Superheroes!

This was the realisation that started making everything else click into place. By the time of the fourth and fifth novels, most of our major characters are ‘Radiants’ — meaning they have access to two discrete magical abilities and effectively unlimited healing, along with greater speed, strength, and endurance, so long as they have access to enough mana. (Which, in this case, is called Stormlight and captured in gems semiregularly when a great storm passes over the world.)

Radiants don’t feel like fantasy adventurers to me. They’re not classic sword & sorcery barbarian heroes, or wizards, or rogues, or really anything the genre is used to. But do you not what they feel a lot like? Superheroes.

Superheroes pretty much across the board have broadly better physical characteristics than non-superheroes. Those things I just mentioned: superior speed, strength, endurance, and healing, they’re not all that common in fantasy but superheroes are all but guaranteed to have them, potentially along with a couple of other discrete abilities of their own. Spiderman has all that plus can shoot webs, climb walls, and sense danger. Superman has that stuff — just even more than most other superheroes — plus flight and laser eyes. Wolverine takes the healing to its absolute extreme and adds a metal skeleton and fist-blade-things on top of that same suite of stock abilities.

The Radiants’ two other abilities also feel more superhero than fantasy coded, in that they are specific, discrete, thematically relevant powers. Flight is the one we see most often, which is another stock superhero ability. (On the other hand, flight is relatively uncommon in fantasy, where characters more commonly fly by riding on something, like a dragon.) Many of the abilities are very explicitly manipulations of the Newtonian laws with semi-scientific explanations for how they work — the manipulation of gravity and friction and so on — which is again common in superhero media but much less so in fantasy. The result is Stormlight begins to feel less like a fantasy novel and more like someone took superheroes out of the comic book and into epic-length prose.

The earlier books, on the other hand, had far fewer Radiants. Those it did have — Kaladin and Shallan — were still figuring out their own powers and had to keep those powers hidden, rather than using them constantly as they do in the later books. Dalinar didn’t have these powers. Adolin didn’t know they existed. Before Stormlight was the story of the Radiants, it was the story of kings and princes and warriors whose only real use of magic was ancient magical weapons and armour. That all just felt much more typically fantasy.

Any Sufficiently Advanced Magic is Indistinguishable From Technology

Aside from the Radiants, the other primary use of magic in this world is the ‘fabrials’ — a form of technology usable by anyone which utilises the same principles as the Radiant powers.

From the beginning, fabrials were used for things like heating and instantaneous communication, with those same semi-scientific explanations for how they work, explicitly referencing Newtonian physics. However, over the course of the series, use of fabrials have increased, as has the series’ own interest in them. Rhythm of War included a whole subplot about them which someone somewhere presumably enjoyed reading. (I’m sorry — that one was just by far my least favourite of the series.) By Wind and Truth, they’re using fabrials in Urithuru for everything from lifts to running water. They’re taking showers using fabrial science.

Technologically, therefore, Stormlight doesn’t feel analogous to our past, which is very different to most epic fantasy. In fact, to me it feels more retro-futuristic. Retro-futurism, however, is not traditionally a fantasy thing. Instead, it usually feels more like sci-fi, in that the actual technology is beyond our present abilities and it’s only the set dressing around the technology that’s semi-historical.

Ever since the coining of ‘steampunk’ (itself coined from ‘cyberpunk’, which of course does not have that historical aesthetic), we’ve been using that ‘Xpunk’ construction for retro-futuristic settings, such as the ‘atompunk’ of the Fallout games. In this case, where the tech is being powered by a kind of magic, what might we call it? Magicpunk? No, I don’t think so. Because those genres lean into the aesthetics of the retro element whereas Stormlight decidedly doesn’t lean into the aesthetics traditionally associated with magic. What’s left is retro-futurism without the retro. It’s soft sci-fi where the tech happens to be called ‘magic’. It’s science fantasy of a sort. Even Star Wars — despite its otherwise far-future aesthetic — leans more into the mystical nature of its magic. (Midichlorians not withstanding.)

But that’s just hard magic, you shout at me.3 Well, it’s predicated on hard magic. But Sanderson has written hard magic systems that don’t end up feeling like another kind of technology. Elantris’s system, where magic is a writing system, isn’t used to replicate modern or futuristic technology. Mistborn’s, where the different magic systems involve using a particular metal to create a particular effect, is perhaps even harder than Stormlight’s (in part because it’s easier to understand and, where it relies on the laws of physics, keeps it all comparatively basic) but felt much more fantasy to me. This use of magic to broadly replicate technology, then, is not inevitable with Sanderson-esque hard magic but instead specific to this particular use of it. The result is a feeling closer to sci-fi than to fantasy.

An Alien World and a Modern World

Fantasy’s physical geography tends to be either broadly Earthlike — with magical additions — or some flavour of absurdist. Roshar is different. Its physical geography is, effectively, an alien biome. The weather, flora, and fauna are all entirely constructed, yet those elements have very little to do with the magic. Instead, the strange plants and animals are built up from evolutionary principles. The result is a world that feels like it could welcome Captain Kirk arriving to survey it on his five-year mission more than than it could Aragon on his quest to reclaim the throne.

And while Roshar’s physical geography fits at home with sci-fi, its human geography4 is positively modern. In the first two novels, we mostly hung out in the warcamps and in a political and social context that nodded towards the historic. Highprinces functioned like feudal grandees. Slavery was common and of crucial plot importance. Gender roles were constricting barriers. None of these individual elements are essential to fantasy, but overall they created a world that felt inspired by the historic and thereby at home with the fantasy that went before it.

But then everything changed. In Oathbringer, all the previously important intra-Alethi politics was abandoned. None of our characters are slaves any longer, so we can just free all the slaves off-page and assume that went fine. And now that women can be Radiants, we should probably just abandon misogyny whole cloth and, like with slavery, assume that no-one ever batted an eye about this.

Suddenly, we’re no longer living in a semi-historic, semi-feudal kingdom but instead in, well, it’s not entirely clear. Society is whatever Dalinar says it is, pretty much. If you don’t like it, the plot will find a way to kill you while Dalinar shakes his head so everyone knows he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial murder.

Now, that’s not to say that characters cannot hold broadly modern social or political views in fantasy media without abandoning a feel of fantasy. A lot of fantasy games, in particular, go that route, as it allows players to craft whatever characters they like without then suffering from discrimination and restrictions. D&D’s official worlds, Thedas from Dragon Age, and Tamriel from The Elder Scrolls all follow that logic and nonetheless immerse the player in a feeling of fantasy.

I also don’t think it’s a bad thing to do that. If a writer isn’t going to meaningfully engage with some social problem, including it merely for the sake of making their world look more historical isn’t in itself a good thing. It may even be distracting. What makes Stormlight feel ‘unfantasy’ isn’t that the characters hold those views but instead that transition, in which the previous social and political system was abandoned wholesale and largely off-page. The result of that is that we are reading about a very different, much more modern feeling world from Oathbringer onwards, which only highlights the lack of any real inspirations from the historic in any aspect of the worldbuilding.

The Basis of Fantasy is History

Throughout all of this, I’ve been identifying the fantastical with the semi-historical. This is because I believe that, at a fundamental level, the fantasy genre is steeped in and broadly inspired by history. Without that, it stops feeling like fantasy.

The earliest fantasists writing for adults were attempting to replicate and put their own spin on fairytales, medieval romances, and the sagas — works of literature that explicitly coated themselves in the historical despite clearly divulging from it. With the creation of the modern fantasy genre, writers replicated the feel of these works while relocating them out of real history and into a constructed secondary world. The adventures of the Arthurian knights were, after all, not at all fundamentally affected by the actual historicity of the eponymous king. At its heart, this early fantasy was rooted in a love of history and a love of these works of literature.

Most important to this tradition is, obviously, Tolkien. Yet on it continued. Fundamentally, the fantasy genre is rooted in a love of real history and a feeling of semi-historicity. It’s there even as recently as George RR Martin’s ASOIAF books, with their acknowledged Wars of the Roses inspiration.

But we’ve had a few generations of fantasy writers since Tolkien codified the genre. Each of those generations have been inspired less by the writing that inspired earlier generations and more by what those earlier generations themselves wrote. Where writers have continued to reach into the historical to supplement their fantastical inspirations, they have continued to reach new heights.5 Where they have merely constrained themselves to already well-trodden ground within the genre, they’ve developed a notable Habsburg chin from all that inbreeding.6

And then there’s Sanderson, who is reaching for new inspirations not from history but from a) his own boundless creativity and b) non-fantasy genre fiction. The result feels new and exciting, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like our genre. Instead, as we’ve seen, it feels like a mishmash of fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero aesthetics.

None of Which is a Criticism

Just to drive that home. I think it’s fascinating that the biggest fantasy series today doesn’t feel much at all like the fantasy genre we know and love. That doesn’t mean the series is bad. If anything, it probably indicates the trajectory of epic fantasy moving forwards. Or, at least, one trajectory that one part of the genre is heading in.

Digestible prose to lower the barrier to entry. Playing with archetypes and ideas from other genres. Moving away from what’s expected; from what’s been done. All of that is intuitive if you want to write fantasy with a mass appeal today. It’s only a short skip and a jump from there into the litRPG and progression fantasy that’s so beloved online, some of which appears to be breaking into the mainstream. If you want to write commercially viable fantasy fiction, there are lessons to be learnt here, even if you personally plan not to embrace these trends. In a decade’s time, this feel/vibe/aesthetic may well have become the norm in mainstream fantasy.

As an obsessive with the historical — for whom the whole appeal of fantasy is the ability to play with the historical without the restrictions of actual history — I’m perhaps less poised to embrace these ideas in my writing or preferred reading, and yet even for me it’s clearly not a dealbreaker. I generally enjoy reading Brandon Sanderson books! So no, to repeat again, not a criticism, even if I clearly have problems with some of Sanderson’s prose and worldbuilding choices.

What this all really means, I think, is that we’re in a moment of transition. The fantasy genre is expanding, encompassing more, and I don’t see that as a bad thing. There’s still more than enough room for fantasy inspired closely by history and the fantasy that has gone before it. At least, I hope there is, given I’m out here writing it.

And, at a more fundamental level, this all raises the question of what genre even is anyway. If it’s mere marketing copy or a convenient way to slice up a shop, then who cares about any of this? If genre is a set of criteria to tick, then perhaps we should exorcise this new turn from fantasy and declare it a distinct genre, but I think that would be rather silly.

As I understand it, genre is a conversation. All literature is, with genres as circles of discussion. Writing that appears to cross genre, then, is merely writing that engages with more than one discussion. It’s the socialite moving between conversations, keeping them in contact with one another.

Stormlight walks up to the fantasy discussion and it talks differently to what’s already there. It stands out. Perhaps it’s not entirely engaging with the rest of the conversation. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have anything interesting to say.

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This interstitial article, posted on my off-week, was supposed to be a note. Then it was supposed to be under 2,000 words. Oh well. I’ll be back in one week with another article and, two weeks after that, my next short story. If you missed my last one, look no further:

And yes, I am officially working on a longer article about the man himself, Brandon Sanderson, which will focus on much more than merely his writing.

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Sometimes, you’ve got an idea that could be a whole novel but know you’re never going to write the novel. In this instance, adopting a more stream of consciousness, zoomed out narrative voice let me fit it into a short story, which was a fun experiment. Without further ado…

One day in late spring when we were both still boys, my brother – who was really only my half-brother because my mother was not the queen but instead a harlot who died birthing me and who I therefore never knew except by reputation (and what a reputation) – asked me something.

‘Brother,’ he began, as he was a kind creature who never remined me of our difference in rank. ‘Brother, shall I be a good king, do you think?’

And I told him, of course, that he would be. What crown prince in all the world has ever heard different?

‘I’m not sure,’ he continued. ‘But I would like to be. Would you help me?’

Readily did I agree. Quite what I could do, as a base-born embarrassment to all around me, I wasn’t sure. But I loved my brother – my half-brother – my brother, and so resolved to do what I might.

He was a slight boy, my brother. Womanly, some called him, though if that were true it would only vindicate the Partheniites in seeing perfection in the androgyne. Besides, any who said so in my hearing were left blue and bloody, even our royal cousins. Bastards, I called them once, meaning it only as an insult, but my brother found it so amusing and laughed his sweet, good-natured laugh until it dawned on me what I had said. There was a difference, I tried to explain, between a bastard and a bastard and, though I could do nothing about the former, I would not allow myself to be the latter.

As we grew – I more than he, though he was the elder by a year – he forced me to sit through his lessons in languages and history and philosophy of all kinds. I’m sure I only held him back, and our tutors considered teaching me an insult, but he would not hear of our being parted. To return the favour, I made him ride and fence, though he preferred a coach and had other men to fight for him. I reminded him daily that, forever, I was one of those men and would strike down all his enemies.

For that, my brother commissioned a painting and gifted it to me. It showed us in classical dress, holding each other as we ran laughing through a forest. On his head, a wreath. In my hand, a sword. I looked at him and he looked into the distance, towards a great city.

When we were coming of age, His Majesty – who I never addressed as father because he never asked me to – requested to speak to me, which he did only rarely. He wished to discuss my future. An army career, he decided. And perhaps a title when I married, assuming the woman was of good stock. I saw nothing against it, as long as my commission would be in a guards column, so I could stay in the capital with my brother. I had a few brothers, but His Majesty knew which one I meant.

And then, of course, His Majesty died. The Prolaisian Disease, which attacks through those most intimate instruments. Someone told me once that the Prolaisians call it the Theman Disease and the Themans blame it on the Xhodesii – that and everything else – but, regardless, His Majesty probably got it off some local girl. My mother, perhaps. It could take years to kill, they said.

Never could Idnedia, oldest of all the Reitan kingdoms, be without a king. They all stormed in while we were playing cards – the ministers and the courtiers and the family – and showed him all the respect they had denied him when we were children and bowed and called him Your Majesty and I bowed too but he kissed my forehead and bid me rise. The title my father had mooted, my brother bestowed upon me that very night, against the strenuous objections of his ministers.

And as a king, my brother had to marry. Queens and princes and princesses – he needed them and didn’t have any. Lists were drawn up of potential consorts. She had to be a foreign royal of youth and, preferably, the true religion. Then they – the ministers and the courtiers and the family again; my brother always knew who I meant when I said they with such distain – set about attacking the lists. This one was widowed and had produced no children despite three years of marriage. That one was overeducated and outspoken. The politics of the thing had to be considered too: alliances and wars and all the rest.

Somehow, a name emerged. A princess of Ofsania, one of the smaller kingdoms to make up the High Kingdom of Vascasia. It would strengthen our alliance with the neighbour that had long eclipsed us, they said. Her brother the king had the ear of the Vascasian king-emperor – was a childhood friend of his. An offer was made through our ambassador to that court and another was returned. There was haggling over the dowry. Finally, it was agreed.

No-one had yet met her, which is the way of it with royalty, but she was rumoured to have a passable beauty and to speak Idnedian, which seemed about all that could be hoped for. One final thing: someone had to fetch her. More than that, there was to be a marriage by proxy with her brother as witness, so she and my brother would already be married when they met.

For the proxy – he who would marry her in my brother’s place – every nobleman in the kingdom put themselves forward. My brother waved them away. I would go, he said. There was outrage. Sending a bastard could be construed as an insult. I asked him if he was sure. He said that he was. It was his brother he was sending, who was a count and a lieutenant-colonel in the guards. Who could be more suitable? There was grumbling, but in this His Majesty had his way.

‘Seduce her for me, Brother,’ he said with a smile. We embraced.

Off I went, with a fine suit of clothes for myself and gifts for her and a great entourage who all looked down their noses at me. Letters too I had, penned by my brother. I hadn’t read them, but I knew him well and could guess the sentiments. Something kind and reassuring and loving. A promise of happiness and a hope for companionship.

Through Idnedia we travelled, and the whole length of Vascasian-ruled Tonaza, and then into Vascasia itself, moving at a snail’s pace. If alone, I could have covered the distance in a single day that it took us four days to cross on that awful journey. Eventually, however, we arrived.

I met the brother, who was cordial as I played the diplomat with him. I met his ministers and his courtiers and his family – every royal had them, it seemed, each more insufferable than the last. But what of the girl?, I asked. The princess, I corrected myself. The queen, soon to be.

‘You’ll meet her on the morrow,’ I was told. The wedding by proxy, that meant.

I hardly slept that night, as though it were my own wedding. It was, in a sense – I would say the vows and take the hand – but it wasn’t, in all the ways that mattered. Finally, the appointed hour.

We met at the altar and I lifted her veil. Whoever had called her a passable beauty insulted her grievously. She was the most beautiful woman who had ever lived, I was sure. Tall and dark and to say any more would be to insult her further, as no words could do justice. Mine couldn’t, at any rate.

Having forgotten what I was supposed to say, she had to remind me. She swore the oaths and I swore them back. For my brother, I told myself. For him did I swear them. Yet it was I who held her. My hands on hers. My lips that brushed her cheek. My ragged breath that caught in a tightened chest.

Afterwards, at the banquet – once the princess had metamorphosed into a queen – I presented her the gifts and the letters. She read them and, when everyone else had retired to bed, she asked me about my brother. I told her of him.

‘You love him dearly,’ she observed to me.

I agreed. None had I ever loved more. None had ever been so deserving. She hoped she would please him. I marvelled she could doubt it.

Our return journey was far too fast. We could dally a little more, surely, I thought daily. No need to rush. Every day, I rode in the coach with her and we spoke and she laughed as we traded anecdotes and retorts. She despised coaches, she revealed. Far too cramped. So I called for horses and we rode a few hours and all was bright and weightless.

She read the letters over and over and peppered me with questions about my brother. Was he very severe? Quite the contrary. But serious, was he serious? He could be. He was a king, after all. What were his pursuits – what did he enjoy? Reading and the theatre. He was a patron of the arts. But mostly he worked. He was a very diligent king. But did he not ride and hunt? Not habitually, no. Only when I could persuade him.

One evening, quite late, the flow of her questions ceased. There was still a query on her face – I could see it clearly – but she found trouble articulating it. I encouraged her. She demurred. I promised that, whatever it was, I would answer truthfully. She made me swear to it. Finally, she asked: did he keep a mistress? Or mistresses? It was normal, of course, but she held out hopes…?

He didn’t, I replied. In truth, though I didn’t say this, he had always been too embarrassed to accept the many offers a crown prince, and then king, habitually endured. Her face, so lined with worry, unburdened. Do you think he will love me? Truly love me, not just as a king to his queen but as a man to his wife? Yes, I said. After all, I could not understand how any being in all the world could fail to love her.

We arrived back home and my heart grew heavy. I went with her and presented her to my brother. Just the three of us, before she was shown off to the court. They had been married already for weeks, yet their first words were stiff and formal. I joked with them, in that familiar way I had with both. Their next words were, nonetheless, stiff and formal still. I coaxed them like skittish horses but it was no use.

She was presented to court and I guided her through it, always at her arm and murmuring in her ear. The intimacy of it set me aflame. In her other ear, my brother attempted the same but seemed always to say the wrong thing. He wanted to reassure her, I knew. She found him only paternal, I could infer. She wanted to charm him, in that effortless way she did. He thought it put on – as charm so often was when directed towards him – and responded coldly.

He showed her a painting he was planning to hang in the Hall of Roses. In it, my brother sat on his throne, looking straight ahead with another beside him. Behind the thrones, figures of the court. First amongst then was myself, gazing at my brother with a hand on his arm and another on the hilt of my blade. In the other throne, a woman. Her face had yet to be painted. Her Majesty would have to sit for it, to complete the picture, he explained.

As we left, someone shouted, ‘Get us a prince tonight, Your Majesty!’ and everyone laughed. My brother distrusted the court’s laughter. Always had done. He reddened.

‘You’ve had a long journey,’ he said to the queen. ‘You may retire to your apartments. I needn’t visit you tonight. Would you escort Her Majesty, brother?’ That last directed to me. In this, as in everything, I obeyed his command.

She begged me enter the apartments, which she was seeing for the first time, and buried her head in her hands.

‘What did I do wrong?’ she asked. ‘Why doesn’t he want me?’

I reassured her that he did. He was only trying to be considerate. I would talk to him. So I did, going to him and saying that she felt he had acted without warmth. That he needed to show passion and desire – that was what she wanted.

‘I would feel rather silly, showing all that, brother. Should I write her a letter, do you think?’

The next day, the consummation was arranged. The royal physician was called, to observe the act and ensure it was properly conducted. It was the event that would truly bind their marriage, under Eynas Reito and under the law. In ages gone, anyone who wanted could have looked in on the royal lovemaking. Royalty was more civilised now.

I waited outside the room with the ministers and courtiers and family, slowly smacking the back of my head against a wall for perhaps half an hour. I tortured myself with thoughts and tried to obliterate them. The physician exited the royal bedchamber and shook his head.

‘Their Majesties have agreed to try again tomorrow,’ he said.

The queen left after him, staring at the floor. The rest departed, save I who knocked on the door.

‘It was that awful man,’ my brother said, after bidding me in. ‘I couldn’t… well, how is a man expected to under those conditions?’

Ignore the man. Focus on her. That was my advice.

‘I tried, Brother, but that made it worse. What if she doesn’t want me, but only a crown? A woman like her could never really want me. What if she’s disgusted when she looks at me?’

She wasn’t, I told him, and then I left him and went to her.

‘I thought men were supposed to…’ she began, before thinking better of her words. ‘They tell me I’m no beauty, but am I truly that ugly?’

I hated them and wanted to hurt them, whoever they were. Ministers, courtiers, family most likely. Bastards every one of them. Real bastards, not my kind. I told her some of how he felt, though it left me feeling awkward and confused and jealous.

For weeks, it continued like that. Me with the two people I loved most desperately, desperately trying to make them love each other, and desperately hoping they wouldn’t. The consummation came, though it took four tries and my brother didn’t often visit Her Majesty’s chambers for repetitions.

‘I feel as an imposition on her,’ he told me. It was too awkward. He was sure it was mere duty, on her part, which left him with no joy in the act.

‘He doesn’t love me’, she told me. They shared no interests. Couldn’t carry a conversation. ‘When he looks at me, I see no passion behind his eyes.’

If she could see passion in the eyes, I wondered what she saw in mine.

When summer came, she asked my brother if she might go to the country for a few weeks. To a house he had gifted her and which she had yet to see.

‘Of course,’ he said, and I cringed to hear the relief in his voice. I was sure she could hear it too. ‘Take my brother with you – he loves the country and you get on so well.’

When she left, he gripped my arm.

‘Talk well of me with her. Make her think kindly of me. Perhaps, on her return, things might be better between us.’

I assured him that I would.

The journey reminded both of us of our first, when I had brought her to her husband and king. As we travelled, lightness and gaiety returned and we spoke easily of everything, though never of the court. I thought little of my brother. I wondered if she thought of him, though.

Our weeks in that house were joyous ones, full of riding and hawks and dogs. Once, we got a letter from His Majesty, asking when we planned to return. The queen answered, though I do not know what she said.

And one night, we drank more than was proper and whispered secrets we oughtn’t have. Yearnings. Conflicts. I was invited to kiss her hand, as I often did, yet I lingered and my warm breath caressed her fingers and I was on my knees before her. No words were spoken, yet there was an invitation. A boundary we tested.

On that night, we stopped at the boundary. Looked across it and imagined but took not a step. Another night, however. On another night, we stepped.

Eventually, we returned. My brother sent me a letter. He needed me. It was the ministers and the courtiers and the family, as usual. Postponing his policies, attacking his appointments, keeping close their long knives, and always asking when a prince might be produced.

When I greeted my brother – absent of the queen, already in her own apartments – he embraced me and I almost wept on his shoulder. He repeated that he needed me. I would sound out the army; ensure its loyalty. Certain generals needed to be retired. Garrisons moved. I would be promoted – only I could be trusted. Was it truly so dire?, I asked.

My brother thought that it was. Did I not remember the Summer Plot against his – our – father, when we were boys? So easily could it have gone the other way. Their dynasty was still but recently established. It was still so easy to imagine an alternative.

‘And how is Her Majesty?’ he said as I was leaving. An afterthought.

She was well, I told him. He should visit her. He was busy, he replied.

We were careful at court, until we weren’t. Rumour swirled and, as is the way with rumour, we were the last to hear of it. His Majesty raised it with me one evening, in so offhand a manner. It just went to show that his enemies would do anything to discredit him and his queen and his favourite brother. And so ridiculous a libel, when all at court knew how close we brothers were to each other. That neither of us ever could act against the other.

I nodded and failed to meet his eye, so unlike myself. It was a wonder I had hidden it even so long as I had. His mind was quick, my brother’s, when it was not clouded by love. In one gesture of mine he knew, and in one gesture of his I could recognise that. So intimate was our fraternity.

Still not looking at him, with tears on my cheeks, I told him that my mind and my heart and my body were his, utterly his, eager for his every command unto my dying breath. But they were hers, too.

‘You’re a bastard. No brother of mine. A true bastard.’

And I nodded, for I was. A bastard in deed as in birth.

A good and kind creature His Majesty was still. I was not exiled – not officially – but promoted and appointed general of all forces on the Daastrijnian frontier, far away from my king and queen. A year I passed there, surveying stores and preparing plans and writing regulations. Rumours reached me, of a different nature to those my brother – my brother no longer – had heard and dismissed.

I sent His Majesty a letter. When he didn’t reply, I sent another to Her Majesty, for the good that would do. I worked quietly and in full determination. One man, I reassigned. Another, I goaded into duelling his fellow officer and then court martialled them both. I pruned my columns until they flowered with loyalty to their commander. And I waited.

The rumours came again, ever stronger. The year was up and my wait too. With two brigades of infantry and another of cavalry, I marched on the capital under a burning summer sun. Word preceded me and, for a week before my arrival, the court buzzed with the news. I was called a traitor. Proof of what happened when a man was raised above his station. That bastards were born of vice and therefore only capable of furthering it: of a consuming and covetous lust for everything they might imagine. They knew no gratitude. Show them a crown and they would grasp it hungrily.

We reached the capital and occupied it, seizing control of its defence from the guards columns I had once counted myself amongst. Officers of those columns, I arrested. The soldiers, I disarmed and sequestered in their barracks. My soldiers even marched into the palace itself and dragged some screaming from their apartments.

Finally, I went to my king. He looked at me in confusion, but without fear. Never, he declared, could he fear me. She was with him. I imagined a boundary. It was within my power: to take his city and take his crown and take his wife. I looked across the boundary. I recoiled from it.

I knelt and presented him my sword. Next, came the papers. The letters and reports and secret memorandums. Those that proved the conspiracy His Majesty had suspected, and that the soldiers of his own guards columns had been poised to arrest him and force him into naming his enemies to every position of influence. To reduce him to a puppet and a prisoner.

The papers – redacted when needed – were released. The plotters executed. My actions lauded. And I once more had a brother and a place at court. For a week did I avoid the queen and she me. The avoidance couldn’t last and, for a single night, I knew perfect bliss.

The next morning, I went to my brother and I bowed and he kissed my forehead and laughed at me but I shook my head and told him I wished to return to my previous appointment. I think he understood, finally, the war in my breast. And I understood it was a war I could not survive.

Once more did I return to court while my brother still lived. It was three seasons after I left, in the throes of spring, when I was invited to celebrate the continuation of the royal line. My brother took me aside at the banquet and showed me the nursery and the small bundle within.

‘She is my heir,’ my brother said. ‘The only one I am like to get. My legacy. My little princess. Mine. Protect her, if I am unable to, Brother. Love her.’

Approaching the cot, I lost myself in her pudgy face and I reached out to hold her hand between my thumb and forefinger. I said that she was perfect. That every part of me was at her disposal, for any need she could ever have.

‘Thank you.’

It was not my brother’s voice. I looked around. He had left. The queen stood in his place. My voice faltered on all the words I could not say and questions I could not ask. Instead, I fled.

Every year, I was sent a miniature of the princess. I treasured them. One year, there was no miniature but a full painting that took up an entire wall of my dining room.

Her Majesty sat with a child on her lap. Behind her, looking stoically at the viewer and with a hand on her shoulder, His Majesty. The child, though, looked over that shoulder at a fourth figure. A man, off to the side. He appeared distracted, tending to a horse and with a dog at his feet. But no, his eyes were on the royal couple and the princess. And I knew his face, for it was mine.

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My next post (sorry substack, I mean ‘article’) on Thursday 19th might be a guide to worldbuilding governments in fantasy and sci-fi, AKA my excuse to talk about my boy Rousseau. But, excitingly, it might otherwise be a discussion of my decision to query my finally finished (second) novel — all depending on whether I can actually start sending it off before then. Two weeks after that, I’ll be releasing the story I initially promised would go in this slot: Fortune’s Favour, a return to naval fiction heavily inspired by Patrick O’Brian’s novels.

Can’t wait that long? This might help orientate through a perusal of my back catalogue:

Duelling is a distinctly early modern phenomenon, and specific to Europe and the settler colonies thereof. That’s not to say that people before that era and in other places didn’t fight each other one-on-one. They did, of course, and this may even have been the result of some insult or as part of some contest. But the early modern duel is something different, inherently tied up with a conception of honour that is distinct to that era and area.1

Honour was everything to a gentleman (that is to say, a man of the upper classes during this period). It was his sense of self; his sense of masculinity. To lose honour was to be emasculated and quite possibly ostracised from the society of other gentlemen. Maintaining honour was, therefore, paramount. More valuable to many gentlemen even than their very lives. In part, this was because a dishonoured man reflected poorly on those around him: his family, his friends, and any institution he was a part of. This further fed into a concept of collective honour which each man within an institution was supposed to protect, or it would lead to loss of honour for the entire institution and every man within it.

But what actually was honour? Mostly, it had to do with the respect of others along with masculinised ideals of physical courage and polite conduct. As such, it was most readily infringed upon by insults, usually of a verbal nature, and most commonly those calling a man’s integrity or bravery into disrepute. Physical harm was an even greater infringement. Once honour was infringed, it could only be maintained by forcing a retraction of that infringement. In the case of an insult, this meant an apology. In the case of physical harm, an apology by itself might not be enough. This is important: it wasn’t being insulted that caused a loss of honour, but instead allowing that insult to go unaddressed.

Another important aspect: only he who has honour can infringe on the honour of others. Being insulted by a woman, a child, or a man of the lower classes might be embarrassing, but it didn’t formally impact a gentleman’s honour. (Though, in the case of women, they had their own passive variant of honour which could be infringed upon by men, after which men close to the woman in question were expected to defend her as if their own honour had been infringed. The inherent paternalism of this idea needs hardly be expanded upon.)

But what if the aggressor (the term for he who creates the insult) refuses to apologise? What if the infringement goes far enough that even apology isn’t enough? In that case, the only way to maintain honour was through a duel.

The Duel

That is what many people today misunderstand about the duels of this period; a misunderstanding that seeps into the media they create. Duels were not, at a fundamental level, about causing harm or proving superiority-at-arms. No, they were about maintaining honour.

By agreeing to a duel, both the aggressor and the injured party prove their bravery in their willingness to risk physical harm and death for the sake of their honour. This in itself is enough to maintain that honour. After that, who actually ‘won’, if anyone could be called the winner at all, was largely besides the point.2

For example, a gentleman gets insulted. He was called a cheat or a liar or a coward. His fidelity, or that of his wife, was questioned. All were common insults of the period. He challenges the insulter to a duel, they fight, but he comes off worse. His honour has been challenged and then he failed to win the subsequent duel, so surely he’s lost that honour, right? No, absolutely not. The very act of taking up arms to defend his honour was enough to maintain it, regardless of outcome.

As an extension of that, the point was almost never to kill. There were some infractions considered so extreme that only death might avenge them. In that case, a duel was usually to be avoided. Nonetheless, though all official rules either banned or discouraged them, duels to the death did happen. They were the minority, however, and most deaths from duels were accidental. (Even when you’re not trying to kill someone, stabbing or shooting at them often has that effect.) Normally, the point was merely to show a willingness to bleed for honour. We’ll see later what specifically this might mean in terms of when and why a duel was terminated and who might be said to have ‘won’ it.

The other misunderstanding is about how duels were actually fought. They were not free-for-alls. Instead, they were highly systematised, even ritualised, affairs with at times absurdly specific rules. There was never a single system — duels changed in nature over the period, differed from country-to-country, and there were always various distinct, even contradictory, rulesets — but nonetheless they did follow a system, be it a single ruleset or an amalgam of them. No matter the specific system, however, rules were strictly followed to separate a duel from a mere brawl.

The (Il)Legality of Duelling

Duels get at an interesting part of legal theory: can you consent to a crime in such a way that it stops being a crime? Often, consenting to something does indeed stop it from being a crime. Consensual transfer of property, for example, is a gift, where nonconsensual transfer is theft. If the supposedly aggrieved doesn’t actually regret what happened, then no real harm is done and thereby no crime committed. At least, according to John Stuart Mill’s ‘harm theory’, a legal doctrine rooted in his utilitarian philosophy.

Except, that’s a prescriptive doctrine that doesn’t describe the law as it actually works. Legally, a crime is not an infraction against an individual but an infraction against the State — conceptualised as the crown (in a monarchy) or the people at large (in a republic). Something being done to someone against their will does describe a large number of crimes, and yet not the totality of crime. Many systems have crimes you can commit against yourself, like taking certain drugs. In other circumstances, something done to another person, even with their consent, is nonetheless a crime.

Consenting to being attacked or being seriously harmed does not, in most circumstances and under most legal systems, stop that attack or harm from being a crime. The law is not omnipotent, however, and so if no-one reports a crime, no-one can be charged with one. Hence, in many circumstances, those consenting to such mutual harm would be able to get away with it. Yet, if egregious harm results — requiring serious medical care, say — it would be difficult to cover up and agents of the state might investigate. If death is the result, that’s murder or, at best, manslaughter. Consenting to dying is a slightly muddier issue in the 21st century but, in the early modern period, when even taking your own life was illegal, this was no defence against a murder or manslaughter charge. And ‘self-defence’ won’t cut it if you consented to being in that situation.

So, killing or seriously harming someone in a duel was always absolutely illegal, covered by the more general crimes of murder, manslaughter, and assault. However, as duelling became more common, the specific act of duelling was increasingly legislated against as well. Practicing at fencing was, of course, not illegal. Yet, if it could be proved that two people had specifically duelled, rather than just practicing their swordsmanship, then that itself was a crime regardless of the result. Even just issuing or accepting a challenge was criminalised. It was also often a specific crime in a military.

Why this was is obvious. The gentlemen of this period were duelling constantly, and it killed them at an alarming rate. In the military, it was even worse. Duelling was a frequent cause of death amongst military officers, undermining the overall quality of leadership within the military and leading to rivalries and grudges. Even where the political and military leaders of the time understood duelling — they were as immersed in the culture of honour as any other gentlemen — they nonetheless had to do whatever they could to stamp it out. (Though, in some cases, blind eyes were turned.)

Did this stop duelling? No, of course not, though it did have an impact. Legislation probably limited duelling to an extent and of course made it a more secretive practice. Nonetheless, the willingness even to break the law to defend honour was in itself something that further showed the gentleman’s willingness to place honour before all else. For some, the illegality added to the romance of the thing. And, besides, there was a widespread culture of silence to protect the practice as much as possible. ‘How did you get that wound?’ ‘Um… tripped? Yeah, definitely tripped. Into my sword. Twice. Yup.’ It was, nonetheless, an awful inconvenience, sometimes forcing duellists to cross a border before settling their differences (crossing state lines was common in the US, as was taking a boat to Calais for Englishmen), or go into exile abroad once the affair was concluded to avoid arrest.

The Challenge

Once there has been an infraction of honour, he whose honour was infringed may issue the formal challenge to a duel. This was referred to as ‘demanding satisfaction’ or ‘calling out’ the other man. At this point, and usually at any point up until the duel began, it was possible for the insulter (the challenged) to issue an apology and thereby avoid a duel while maintaining the honour of all involved. If the insult was a public one, the apology might have to be too — for example, it often had to be printed in a newspaper or posted at a gentleman’s club. However, it wasn’t always so simple.

First, it might be unclear who exactly had the right to challenge. This might be the case if two people had mutually insulted each other, for example. In such cases, most rules stated that he who was first insulted has the right to challenge. A physical attack was always treated much more seriously than a mere verbal insult, and so always took precedence. In the case of mutual blows, again the right of challenge usually went to he who was first struck. In these cases, apologies were usually required from both parties. No matter the insult, returning or escalating an insult was ungentlemanly, after all. One other case where the right to challenge might be unclear is if two people were not permitted to duel because, under many rulesets, people over and under a certain age were not supposed to duel. In such cases, in might be permissible for someone else (e.g. a son or brother) to accept or issue a challenge in their place.

Secondly, it might be unclear what the specific insult was. In the case of of the famous Burr-Hamilton duel, Burr called Hamilton out without citing a specific offence. The entire Federal political and journalistic apparatus had insulted Burr repeatedly during the 1804 election, but what specific insult he was objecting to and why he was calling out Hamilton in particular was unclear. If Hamilton had wanted to apologise, then, it would have been difficult to do so. Most duelling codes would not allow such a challenge to go ahead but, nonetheless, it’s clear from this example and others that if the principals wanted to duel, they would duel. In these cases of unclarity, it was generally up to the seconds — we’ll get to them soon — to sort out the details.

As a last note on challenges, though it’s more dramatic for challenges to be issued in person, they were also often issued in writing. If the insult didn’t take place in the presence of the insulted, but instead they heard about it after the fact, for example, then it was more common to have to send a challenge in a letter. Otherwise, an insult might take place in person but a challenge nonetheless not be immediately forthcoming. Someone might not realise they had been insulted or might not be sure if the level of insult necessitated a duel, and so would discuss with their friends before deciding whether to issue a challenge of not. In cases where a challenge might soon be issued, this was acknowledged by the interested parties informing each other of where they were staying so that the other would know where to send his challenge. Some rulesets actually preferred a written challenge to one issued in the heat of the moment.

Though you might not expect this, most duelling codes are primarily rules for this part of the duel: who can challenge who, over what, and in what circumstances. In contrast, the rules for the actual duel itself seem almost an afterthought.

Types of Duel

At the start of the period, there was just one type of duel: the sword duel. However, as the period went on, two others were added: the pistol duel and the sabre duel.

What’s the difference between a sword and a sabre? If you know modern fencing, you’re already aware.

A sword (or, to use the French, épée) meant a straight, stabbing weapon without a sharp edge. Beginning in the 16th century and throughout the 17th, the primary civilian sword, worn at court and used for self-defence, was just such a stabbing weapon with a long, straight, thin blade and an elaborate guard to protect the hand. In English, it’s usually called a rapier, probably from the Spanish ‘espada ropera’. Espada, sword. Ropera, robe or dress. A dress sword, a courtly sword.

By the end of the 17th century, people got rather annoyed at carrying around such a long, unwieldly weapon. Daintier versions were created, much smaller in length. In English, they are creatively referred to as smallswords and were the primary swords worn at court, for self-defence, and by infantry officers for most of the 18th century. Modern épée fencing simulates fighting with these weapons (which is why a ‘hit’ only counts when landed with the point of the weapon) and, in the 18th and early-19th centuries, it is this, the smallsword, that was meant by ‘sword’. Before this, however, when duelling was less systematised, you could fight with whatever swords you wanted so long as both principals used similar weapons.

Earlier sword duellists, as well as using more varied weapon sets, often used another implement in their off-hand, intended to parry. This might be a buckler (small shield covering the back of the hand) or some form of long knife / short sword. Some manuals even show how a cloak might be used to parry. However, by the time of the transition to the smallsword, this practice had come to an end. Under some rulesets, the participants in a duel could agree to using their off-hand to knock aside their opponent’s sword (though not grab it). If this wasn’t agreed to, however, the off-hand was to be used for balance alone. (Using the off-hand to strike or grab was never permitted.) If this rule was broken, the infringing participant could have their hand literally tied behind their back to prevent further foul play.

In contrast to a ‘sword’, a sabre, refers to a sword with a sharp edge, which can therefore cut/slash as well as thrust. Using modern sword-nerd terminology, a sabre is something more specific: single edged, curved, and with a sabre-style guard, meaning a knuckle-bow (a single bar of metal protecting the knuckles) or half-basket (a more elaborate guard which also protects the back of the hand).

However, in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, the term sabre usually meant any edged sword, including the types that we might otherwise call a backsword (any sword with a sharp front edge and a flat back one) or broadsword (otherwise called a basket-hilted sword, this term refers to swords sharp on both sides and with elaborate guards to protect the entire hand). Even more specific terms like ‘hanger’ and ‘cutlass’ would likewise be placed under the ‘sabre’ umbrella at the time. Again, modern sabre fencing reflects this, allowing ‘hits’ with both the point and edge of the weapon.

Swords and sabres used slightly different rulesets reflecting the differences in the weapons — that one had an edge, and the other didn’t — and cultures around them — in particular that the sabre was more of a military weapon and sword more of a civilian one. One obvious difference is that there were no rules for using the off-hand to parry in sabre duelling because, well, slapping away a sharp edge is a very, very bad idea if you still want to have a hand afterwards.

And then there’s pistols, and frankly I’m disappointed that I have to explain this to you. It’s a thing you hold in one hand and it fires a bullet when you pull the trigger. More specifically, by the time pistol duels started to be opted for in the 18th century, these were flintlock firearms. That is, they used a spring mechanism to force a piece of flint against a piece of steel when the trigger was pulled. The resultant sparks ignited the gunpower, causing an explosion and forcing out the bullet.

By this point, gunsmiths had figured out rifling (spiral grooves inside the barrel that make the bullet fly straighter) but rifled pistols were strictly banned in duels because their increased accuracy made them too dangerous. (Because, again, the point wasn’t to kill.) Secretly bringing a rifled pistol to a duel was a great dishonour, yet some tried to get away with it. Pistols were inspected for rifling by the seconds — more on that later — but DIY rifling, called scratch rifling, was less deep and more likely to pass inspection. Whether scratch rifling actually made a weapon more accurate, though, is debated. Regardless, it was the general custom for one side to provide both pistols and for them to be, wherever possible, a matched set so as not to give either principal an advantage.3 With swords or sabres, on the other hand, both principals could usually use their own weapon if they wanted, though they would be inspected to ensure they were of a reasonably similar length and style. This was easiest if both principals were officers in the same military regiment, as then they could use their regimental pattern weapon.4

One principal got to choose the weapons — under some codes that’s the challenger and, under others, the challenged. While this was his right alone, there was nothing stopping him from deciding in consultation with his own second, that of the other principal, or even the other principal himself. Even once he had decided on the weapons, the other party may have the right to refuse them. Civilians, for example, might have the right to refuse sabres (they being, as stated, primarily a military weapon). Disability may also allow the refusal of a certain weapon set: men missing limbs may refuse sword and sabre; those missing eyes may refuse pistols. Sometimes, principals brought multiple weapons: starting with the pistols but potentially moving onto swords or sabres if neither could land a hit.

Principals and Seconds

I’ve already used the terms, so let’s explain them. The principals are the duellists themselves — the insulter and the insulted who have decided to fight a duel about it.

Assisting them are their seconds. The principals just have to turn up and fight. All the rest is the seconds’ job. When a challenge to duel is issued, both sides will immediately name their seconds and, if the principals haven’t already agreed to it, it is the seconds who will discuss the time, place, method, and rules of the duel. Which side got to pick which depended on the ruleset. Under some rulesets, a particularly severe offence (like a physical attack) allowed the challenger to name all of these.

Seconds bring and inspect the weapons, and load them in the case of a pistol duel. They additionally act as go-betweens for their principals. If one side wishes to withdraw, or to formally apologise (potentially averting the duel), or if anything needs to be altered, all of that goes through the seconds. Some codes even required that the seconds seek an apology or amicable settlement from the principals, only progressing to a duel if this could not be achieved.

During the duel itself, the seconds act as referees. They inspect the principals, ensuring they are not concealing armour or a hidden weapon. In a pistol duel, they mark out the ground (where the principals will stand, or start, depending on the method) and say when the principals can fire. In sword and sabre duels, they announce when the duel can commence, a break should be taken, their principals have been hit, and if their principals can no longer continue. No matter the duel, they keep a watchful eye for rule breaking and at any time may stop the duel to address an infraction.

Additional people are also expected to attend. Some codes required two seconds per principal. Some required one or two witnesses per principal. Even if one isn’t formally required, it’s always good to ensure a physician is there to administer first aid. (Actually, there were usually two doctors so both principals could be treated simultaneously.) Getting all these people to the field of honour (that is, where is duel is to be fought) is, once again, the seconds’ task. In some earlier rulesets, seconds might even fight alongside their principals — though in such cases further seconds might be required to act as referees.5

Upon the Field of Honour

The earlier in the period, the more common the sword duel. The later, the more common the pistol duel. But, throughout, similar rules were followed.

For sword and sabre duels, the first task would be to mark out the duelling ground. This might be done with handkerchiefs weighed down by stones. Next, preparing the principals. As already stated, they were checked for armour or other protections and, to avoid any advantage that heavy clothing might give, often duelled in their shirts or topless. (Which had the added benefit of protecting the principals’ expensive coats — clothing being a much larger expense in those days.) The only explicit protection they were allowed was a heavy glove on the sword hand. If neither principal had a glove, or they agreed not to use them, they were nonetheless always permitted to use something to protect the hand, even if that was merely wrapping the cord on the end of their pommel around their knuckles, or doing something similar with a handkerchief. The only rule there was that no part of the cloth could hang down, as their opponent’s sword might get caught on it.

Once the duel began, it was generally fought until one or both principals either could not continue or voluntarily withdrew. ‘First blood’ was not the usual end point, though that depended on the wound: a small nick could be ignored, though a larger cut might cause a withdrawal. Remember that the point was to maintain honour and prove that you were brave enough to risk your life, which meant fighting until you had given a good account of yourself. The most common cuts were small ones to the forearm, which usually would not end the duel. On the other hand, a deep stab to the torso most likely would. Naturally, the line between a small cut and a mortal wound is often a thin one, and one might even be mistaken for the other. Though not intended to be, the outcome would therefore not infrequently be deadly.

The seconds, with either a cane or sword in hand, would raise the implement and call a halt when the principals were hit, stepped out of the field of honour, dropped their weapon, or broke a rule. This could lead to distinct ‘rounds’ of short action, followed by periods to catch the breath, get any wounds treated, and reset, not dissimilar to modern boxing.

In general, the conduct for sword and sabre duels was fairly straight forward: stab at each other until someone gives up. By contrast, the pistol duel.

There are infinite ways to conduct a pistol duel. How far apart should the principals stand? How many shots should they fire? When and how should those shots be fired? And when should the duel end? For obvious reason then, pistols duels required far more rules than sword and sabre duels.

The most common form of pistol duelling in modern media depicts the principals as starting back-to-back, walking a certain number of paces, then turning to fire as quick as they could. This method isn’t listed in any duelling code I’ve ever found, so my assumption is that it is either of dubious historicity, or was very uncommon, or had fallen out of use by the time our surviving codes were being compiled. Personally, I think it was just made up, though I’m happy to be proven wrong.

In reality, the seconds would measure out the points from which the principals would fire, marking out the field of honour. How far apart the principals stood was up to them but there was a minimum distance separating them to limit the danger of the duel. How far? The influential French system established by the Comte de Chateauvillard in 1836 always maintains at least 15 paces between the combatants. On the other hand, John Lyde Wilson’s The Code of Honour (1838) allows just ten paces, but defines a pace as three feet (a little longer than the usual definition of two-and-a-half feet). This gives an overall minimum distance of 30 feet or, to use a real measurement system, a little over nine meters. If we assume Chataeuvillard was using something closer to the more conventional definition of a pace (despite being — presumably by no fault of his own — French), then his 15 paces are 37.5 feet or about 11-and-a-half meters.

The most common form of pistol duelling had each principal stand at their mark, an agreed number of paces from each other, and then fire an agreed number of shots (anywhere from one to three each) at each other. They might fire simultaneously or one after the other after drawing lots to determine who would fire first. After each pair of shots, the principals could agree to reconcile and end the duel but, if not, the seconds would reload the pistols (seconds always load for their principals, and were allowed to inspect each other doing so) and hand them back to the principals. On the other hand, if either was hit, that was also the usual end of the duel. If one was hit but had yet to discharge his pistol, he might be permitted to do so, assuming that he could perform this act in a timely fashion. (One code gives a wounded principal two minutes to return the shot before the duel is terminated.) Misfires, not uncommon with flintlock pistols, were counted as shots.

An interesting variant of this system, little used in the Anglosphere but more popular on the continent, was the duel ‘at pleasure’, also known as the barrier duel. In this system, the principals, upon being told to begin, would walk slowly towards one another. At any point, they were allowed to stop and fire. Upon doing so, however, they had to hold their place. Their opponent could then walk right up to their mark — the end of their line, separated by a minimum distance from their opponent’s mark — before firing. He who fired first could potentially avoid being shot at entirely but, if he missed, gave his opponent complete freedom to close the gap and take aim in their own time. There were even variations on this variation, like one in which the principals walk, not directly towards one another, but along parallel lines, starting at opposite ends. The principal who fires first must once again stand still, allowing the opponent to walk until they are directly opposite (though still separated by the distance between the two lines) before taking their shot. Another, listed by Chataeuvillard, has the principals approach in a zigzag rather than straight towards one another, making it harder to land a shot as you walked.

The idea of standing calmly while someone shoots at you seems a little unhinged, and yet the pistol duel became only more popular as the period marched on. Unlike with swords or sabres, where a withdrawal with honour could only come after one or both principals had sustained serious injuries, it was entirely honourable for both sides to walk away from a pistol duel without a scratch. Having fired the agreed number of shots, the duel would end no matter the outcome. And, if either principal was hit, no matter how superficially, the duel would end (perhaps with them returning fire first).

A possibility that this opened up was to intentionally miss. After all, duels aren’t about winning but about proving a willingness to duel. If both sides felt the need to duel, but equally did not want to actually harm each other, then why not agree to both fire wide? This was called deloping and seems to have been a common practice during the heyday of the pistol duel. Though, of course, it can be difficult to ascertain when someone has intentionally deloped as opposed to when they have merely missed. As an example, the Wellington-Winchilsea duel, which was the second (and last) example of a sitting British prime minister engaging in a duel. The Duke of Wellington felt compelled by honour to call the Earl of Winchilsea out for various very strong and public political attacks. Winchilsea, for political reasons, did not want to back down and apologise but nor did he actually want to harm Wellington, nor indeed be harmed by him. Hence, they were forced by the rules of honour to duel, despite neither really wanting to, and both fired well clear of the other man.

Some Duelling Stories

To round off, let’s discuss a few lesser known duels. These are all from The History of Duelling Volume 2, by J. G. Millingen, which is a compilation of duelling accounts complied largely from letters, newspapers, and court transcripts, skewed towards the late-18th and early-19th centuries. I hope they help show the reality of duelling and the kind of offences that led to it.

The Earl of Lonsdale and Captain Cuthbert, 1792

Cuthbert, a captain in the guards, ordered a road closed. Londsdale, wishing to pass through it in his carriage, shouted, ‘You rascal, do you know that I am a peer of the realm?’ Cuthbert replied, ‘I don’t know that you are a peer; but I know you are a scoundrel, for applying such a term to an officer on duty; and I will make you answer for it.’ At the subsequent duel, they each fired two pistols but neither was injured and they settled their dispute.

Colonel King and Colonel Fitzgerald, 1797

King’s 16-year-old sister eloped with the already married Fitzgerald. King challenged Fitzgerald and they exchanged six shots at a distance of just ten paces without injury. Still unable to amicably settle, they agreed to return the next day but were arrested before they could do so. The story takes a more tragic turn after their release: the King family went to Ireland but Fitzgerald (encouraged by a letter from Miss King) followed them. There, he was confronted again by Colonel King, they struggled over a pistol and King’s father, the Earl of Kingston, came across them. Fearing for his son’s life, he shot Fitzgerald dead.

Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery and Captain Macnamara, 1803

While riding separately, the two men’s dogs attacked each other. Not seeing Macnamara, Montgomery declared he would ‘knock down’ the owner of the other dog. Macnamara took offence to this and they agreed to duel. Both their shots hit, Montgomery died, but Macnamara survived and was put on trial for manslaughter. Nonetheless, the jury returned a not guilty verdict. (Which appears to be a case of jury nullification, as there’s no question as to whether or not he actually did the crime.)

Fictional Duels

And, while I’ve lambasted duels as sometimes portrayed in fiction, it would be remiss of me not to mention some great examples.

First, obviously, Pierre’s duel in War and Peace. It’s an example of a barrier duel and perfectly plays with the tension of the two walking towards each other, gauging when to fire. The insult — the allegation that Dolokhov is sleeping with Pierre’s wife, something he has to respond to even though he and his wife don’t get on at all — also gets at this being fundamentally a matter of honour, and that honour is of such critical importance that even mild-mannered and enlightened men like Pierre feel required to participate in its precepts. Of course, it helps that Tolstoy was writing at a time when duelling was still practiced and so understood this culture personally.

For a more modern example, the novel HMS Surprise by Patrick O’Brian. It’s the third in the Aubrey-Maturin series but, if you haven’t read them, you should. Again, we see the kind of situation that leads to a duel and how a duel was carried out. We also see how, though a duel wasn’t supposed to be about killing, it could be used by men who genuinely did want to murder each other. Others might look askew at such duels, but they did happen, of course. This is just one of the thousands of reasons to read one of the greatest series of historical novels ever written.

I’ve also tried my own hand at writing duels. You can read my latest attempt here:

Duelling is of critical importance in my WIP fantasy novel, which I’ll be querying imminently. Two pistol duels set off the plot, one in which a king is killed and another that permanently injures our main character and forces him into the rest of the novel. The latter is even a duel ‘at pleasure’, one of the novel’s many nods towards War and Peace. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to share it with you all.

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Thank you for reading. My next short story, releasing in two weeks on Thursday 5th March, should be Fortune’s Favour, a cat-and-mouse chase on the high seas. Two weeks after that, my next non-fiction will be a discussion of worldbuilding governments in fantasy and sci-fi — I have many, many opinions.

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The duel is the forge of honour. There, it is battered. That of lesser men shall break. Yet, in victory and defeat, the honour of superior men emerges only sharper, better tempered, and gleaming. – The Reflections and Advice of a Humble Swordsman, by Charles-Marie Eppay, the Lord Eppay, published in 3,830.

‘How are they, these young men of Prolais?’ asked Charles-Marie as they stepped into the hall. ‘Is the grand duchy’s honour secure in this next generation of noblemen?’

Before them, a score of young men practicing at smallsword, each pretending not to have noticed their masters’ entry.

Commandant Saix shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘They’ll do. None to match you, my lord.’

‘Don’t flatter, old friend. If they lack, perhaps their teacher is at fault. What do you think? Should I dismiss you and find some other man to train these young sops?’

Saix opened his mouth in the facsimile of a smile. He was an excellent fencer and a better teacher – talents that had been wasted on the Grenadier Guards, where Charles-Marie had found him – but utterly humourless in spite of every attempt to correct the fault.

‘None to match you in your prime,’ Saix corrected. ‘But a few… aye, a few are more than serviceable. Two in particular.’

‘Which?’

‘Him, of the dark complexion.’ The commandant – a title he still insisted on, years after he left the army – nodded towards one of the boys.

‘Very dark,’ Charles-Marie replied in surprise. The youth in question was well proportioned, a look of strength without bulk. Under tight white stockings, a well-shaped calf. Black curls above a determined face. He practiced alone, dancing through his movements with grace and pride and not a whiff of exertion.

‘Nabkai mother. He has their look.’

‘But a nobleman?’ A silly rule, but none would think Charles-Marie’s the best, most prestigious fencing academy in all the world if they let in commoners, no matter the skill and reputation of its founder.

‘He’s Count il’Proveux’s son. You’ve heard the story?’

‘I have not.’

‘Years ago, before he was the count, he ran off to Nabkuun. Rumours of theft, covered up by the family. Then his father died. Then his brother. Upon hearing of it – how he heard at all is a mystery written only in the Apocrypha – he rushed home to claim the title and property, this boy in tow.’

‘A bastard, then. Which makes him noble only if his mother was too. Was she, by whatever standard they use on the southern continent?’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Saix. ‘The boy insists his parents were married. That, thereby, he’s high nobility, his father’s heir, and properly styled Viscount Proveux to boot.’

‘What does the father say?’

‘Little. He seems to grant the boy is noble, educated him as befits it, and wrote a letter ensuring me nothing should stop his son from attending your academy. At the same time, he’s found himself a young countess and would hardly claim to bigamy. He’s neither confirmed his son’s use of the courtesy title nor denounced it.’

‘Leaving the boy’s status rather uncertain,’ Charles-Marie mused.

‘Aye, but not his sword arm. He’s Nabkai of look, but Prolaisian in bearing. Whatever the law might or might not say, converse with him and watch him fight and you’ll feel his nobility.’

‘You appear quite the admirer, Saix. But two, you said. Where’s the second?’

‘The second, of course, is he of the greatest pedigree here. Lord Leofric il’Prolais, whose father is Count il’Saisan.’

‘The grand duke’s cousin. He’s fourth in line to rule us all, is he not? Making this boy fifth, or am I mistaken?’

Ridiculous that he could not remember the grand duke’s extended family, but Charles-Marie had spent so much time outside Prolais as he toured the world to display his swordsmanship.

‘Sixth: he’s the younger son,’ Saix replied. ‘Either way, a man of consequence. Of the two, I’d call him the lesser, but that might be nothing more than the influence of the year between their ages.’

‘And my nephew? How does he progress?’ asked Charles-Marie.

‘He’s unlikely to emerge undefeated from two dozen duels, or live up to any of your other feats, but nor shall he disgrace the Eppay name,’ Saix replied. ‘Truly, if not for the other two, he’d be the best we have.’

‘Pair them all up, then. Put them through their paces.’

At a word from their master, the youths froze. Saix rattled off names and they scrambled to find their partner.

Charles-Marie smiled, his hand gracing the familiar leather of his sword’s hilt as he remembered his own time sharpening his skills to a razor’s edge. Long past, it all was. He had not fought a duel, or even fenced in public, for half a dozen years. Those years, they had caught up to him, and it wouldn’t do to mar his reputation with an embarrassing defeat resultant only from limbs devoid of youthful vigour.

In his younger days, he had jumped at every opportunity to duel, not for honour but for the love of swordplay and to prove his skill. Now, he studiously avoided matters of honour. Scores of young swordsmen would, he was sure, jump at the opportunity to call him out – or force him to call them out – and so test themselves against the greatest fencer Prolais – nay, the world – had ever known. He refused to give them the opportunity.

A disturbance. Shouting. Charles-Marie’s fencing reflexes settled immediately upon two young men: the dark boy and, paired up with him, his own nephew.

‘I won’t disgrace myself by crossing swords with some common bastard,’ said Jacques, son of Charles-Marie’s older brother.

Quick as a viper’s lunge, the other boy’s steel was out, devoid of the piece they would affix to the end for sparring, to safely enclose the sharp point.

‘Give me my title, Master Eppay. It is not difficult: Viscount Proveux.’ The youth spoke Prolaisian perfectly, his face charmingly disarming. The sword, he held light, nonchalant, under Jacque’s chin.

Jacque pushed the sword away. ‘How dare you. When my uncle hears that you are merely the spawn of some foreign harlot, he’ll have you thrown out of here on your ear, and we will all laugh at your pretentions.’

The sword returned to its previous position. ‘My title, Master Eppay. Or I shall call you out.’

‘I don’t recognise your right to duel me, Thomas. And no other name shall I give you, for you have a right to none.’ Jacques leaned into the sword’s point, pressing it against his skin. ‘Harm me, and I’ll have you beaten like a dog.’

‘Gentlemen!’ Saix’s military bark echoed through the hall.

‘This is unbecoming,’ Charles-Marie said into the silence as he stormed up to the pair. ‘Put away your steel and fiery words.’

The sword disappeared and its owner turned and bowed.

‘Lord Eppay, this man might be your nephew but he is a dishonourable coward, unworthy of his blood.’

‘Uncle, please have this cur escorted out. I already told your lackey that he should never have been admitted.’

Beside him, Charles-Marie sensed Saix stiffen.

‘The commandant is your instructor, not a lackey. Show him, and your fellow students, some respect, nephew.’

‘He’s not a student, uncle. He’s base! Not worthy!’

The other boy, whatever his proper address might be, honed burning eyes into Jacques.

‘Satisfaction,’ he said. ‘I demand it!’

‘I tell you again, you have no more right to it than you do to that title you parade around.’

‘Then perhaps the flaw is not yours,’ the other retorted. ‘Perhaps it is in your father, who failed to instil either courage or etiquette into his progeny. Perhaps it is in your uncle, for allowing such a creature to pollute his academy’s reputation.’

‘Young sir,’ Charles-Marie cut in, anger rising. ‘Viscount Proveux I shall name you, for I have no reason not to. But here you go too far. Withdraw all insults and apologise, the both of you.’

‘You ask the impossible, uncle.’

‘If he does not withdraw, then neither do I,’ said Proveux or Thomas or whatever else it might be. It was to that boy that Charles-Marie turned.

‘You have insulted more than my nephew, you understand? You have insulted my absent brother and, I fear, you have insulted me. These insults at least, you will withdraw. You claim to be a man of honour, so prove it.’

The youth seemed not to have cooled in the slightest.

‘My lord,’ he said, ‘I have said no word that is not true.’

‘You insist upon an infringement of my own honour, and that of my family?’ Charles-Marie asked, hoping to keep the note of desperation from his voice. This was everything he had been avoiding for years.

‘If you choose to understand it that way, sir, then yes I do.’

The rest of the hall faded. There was but the two of them. Charles-Marie, still lean and agile, quick of wrist and of eye, but with a pain in his back and a stiff shoulder and that knee which had never fully healed. And the boy, who had two inches on him and a flawless physique and a reckless, angry bravado that radiated from his every movement.

‘Then it is I who must demand satisfaction.’ And damn his honour for forcing such a thing. But letting an insult pass uncontested would savage his reputation more than losing a hundred duels.

‘Uncle, don’t demean yourself.’

Charles-Marie grabbed Jacques and pulled him in close.

‘It is you who have demeaned yourself and this is the result.’

He released his nephew with a shake of the head.

‘Swords,’ Proveux said, taking away Charles-Marie’s last hope, that they might opt for pistols and so save him the possibility of losing in a contest of blades to the boy. But no, the boy wanted it, of course. Besting the great Lord Eppay would be, unlike titles and blood, an achievement none could take away from him.

‘Very well. Command Saix shall second for me. And for you?’

Proveux looked unsure. He glanced around the hall.

‘I do not… there is a man, perhaps. I would have to write to him.’

‘Better not to delay,’ said Charles-Marie.

‘I’ll second for him, if he’ll have me.’

All eyes turned to the speaker. Another tall boy – were they all so tall, these days? – though blond of hair and something familiar in the features.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lord il’Prolais,’ said Jacques. None paid him mind.

Of course. The scion of the grand ducal house. Yes, there truly was something of Grand Duke Abellon V’s deep blue eyes and full lips there, and in those light curls too.

‘Truly, my lord? You would second for me?’

‘I would, Proveux, if only to see you tested against the master.’

‘Lord il’Prolais,’ Charles-Marie said with a deferential nod, ‘you do understand that—’

‘That one of my station should not condone a practice His Grace my cousin has attempted so rigorously to stamp out? Yes, sir, I understand it. Nonetheless, I shall second.’

‘Very well. I trust you and Command Saix can make the arrangements.’ Charles-Marie spared his final look for his challenger. ‘I shall see you on the field of honour.’

‘I am gratified to hear it, sir.’

***

Early the following morning, mist still swirling above frozen grass. Half a league south-west of Tabresorteux’s Tessenquey Quarter. Charles-Marie had fought another duel on the same ground, a decade and a half ago. He couldn’t remember— no, it had been against that naval officer. The one who couldn’t hold his wine. What had been his name?

Saix’s hand on his shoulder forced Charles-Marie back to the moment. That long defeated man’s name didn’t matter. This man’s did. Or, no, no it did not, for that name might be Mr Thomas Davy or Lord Thomas il’Proveux or Viscount Proveux and it mattered not at all compared to what he could do with a smallsword.

The seconds came together. Lord Leofric il’Prolais wore an easy smile, mirrored on the face of his principal, and a coat of the boldest royal blue.

‘Might your principal withdraw the insult?’ asked Saix, loud enough that both principals could hear.

‘He shall not,’ il’Prolais replied. ‘He is resolved to blood.’

‘Very well then.’

The inspections began. Charles-Marie and his challenger discarded coats and waistcoats, leaving them shivering from the cold and nervous energy in their shirts. Well knowing that shaking muscles were liable to fail, Charles-Marie busied himself rubbing at them as the swords were brought out. Charles-Marie’s, it was found, was the longer by half an inch. il’Prolais declared it no issue. With Proveux’s advantage in height, it would render their reach almost even.

As the principals watched, the two seconds busied themselves with handkerchiefs and stones, marking out the field of honour. It created something not unlike a summoning circle, of the type witches of the bygone ages were alleged to have used. Something to trap terror and evil within. A circle of violence, where all other rules of conduct were to be forgotten, and promptly remembered upon leaving. It was a melancholy thought, like Charles-Marie had never been plagued with before in all his previous duels.

He forced himself to look at his opponent instead. The duel, he firmly believed, had already begun, though contained only to the mind for the moment. Many times had he won that duel of the mind so completely that, upon entering the circle, there was no longer a contest. His opponent had become so demoralised, so afeared, as to be sure of losing.

The young Viscount Proveux was jumping in place, arms relaxed, and seemed not at all to notice Charles-Marie’s gaze. He stopped, glanced at his opponent as if seeing him for the first time, and opened his mouth.

‘We could have chosen a warmer hour, my lord.’

‘Blame our seconds, young sir. Or the necessity to be covert.’

‘In truth, this Prolaisian sun is always too weak for comfort.’

‘Different to that you grew up under, I am sure.’

‘Aye. Hiltak of the golden rays favours their children.’

‘You keep your mother’s faith?’ Charles-Marie asked, surprised.

The boy shrugged. ‘I do and I don’t.’

‘This won’t make them respect you, you know. Win all the duels you like. Your faith, your colour, your birth will still be wrong.’

‘There is no law against my colour.’

‘Who mentioned the law? What we are about to do is against the law, and yet we do it. Law is for the rabble: it means nothing to a nobleman.’

‘And my birth is as legitimate as yours.’

‘That may be true, and it may not. What will you do, duel all who deny it?’

‘If I must. Duel them. Kill them.’

‘There is no honour in that.’

‘There is no honour in those who spit on my name. They can all be so many corpses beneath my blade, for all I care.’

‘And none of that will change the opinions of those who remain. Threat of violence, you see, only hardens hearts, never alters them.’

‘You may take the field,’ Commandant Saix interrupted. ‘There to battle until one or both of you can no longer continue, or until you can be reconciled in honour.’

‘Eynas Idarniso protect you,’ Charles-Marie said. Proveux returned the courtesy before taking his glove and blade from Lord il’Prolais.

The duellists took their places, no more than two feet separating the tips of their shining blades. They dropped into mirroring stances, though Proveux held his off-hand a little higher. A theatrical move; Charles-Marie had long believed such a position was inferior for maintaining balance.

‘To your guard. Prepared? Begin!’ shouted il’Prolais, and then there was no more time for thought.

Charles-Marie struck first. He always did. It was surprising how many were unprepared for it. But not this boy. He parried lightly and stepped forwards, closing the gap between them and flicking his wrist for a jab at Charles-Marie’s upper arm.

A twist brought the blade past him, exposing his opponent. Charles-Marie centred his blade and stabbed, aiming towards the youth’s shoulder. It should have run him through. Instead, Proveux arrested his own momentum with an enviable poise and threw himself back, raising his sword to Charles-Marie’s and knocking the attack away with a hair’s breadth to spare.

Or perhaps less than that. Proveux grimaced and took another step back and held his sword in a warding guard. His off-hand went to the shoulder and tarried there a moment.

‘Hit,’ said Lord il’Prolais. ‘Halt.’

Charles-Marie rose from his guard position and took a breath while his opponent spoke to the seconds. The boy was quick, agile, strong, and of no mean skill. First blood may have gone against him, but Charles-Marie had no delusions of the duel stopping there.

‘Viscount Proveux can continue,’ said Saix. Sure enough, he returned to the circle without even consulting the physician. ‘Back to your guard. Prepared? Begin!’

Lesser duellists would have hesitated, or overcompensated in protecting the little wound. Not Proveux. He lunged and Charles-Marie executed a perfect sixth parry but had no time to riposte as Proveux redoubled the attack, luring their blades low.

Another exchange and Proveux’s sword penetrated Charles-Marie’s guard and scraped along his glove but couldn’t bite into it. Charles-Marie forced him back with an attack designed to be deflected and took a step back to allow himself a moment of respite. Endurance, ultimately, would make the difference between them. The longer it all went on, the greater the advantage to the younger man.

‘You’re good for your age,’ the younger man murmured. Charles-Marie chuckled in spite of himself.

‘And you, for yours,’ he replied, seizing the moment of potential distraction to lunge, aiming high.

Taking a step to the side, Proveux parried and riposted, forcing Charles-Marie on the defensive. He took a step back, eying a gap in his opponent’s guard. Before he could exploit it, he cried out and fell to the ground, his knee aflame.

He couldn’t have been hit – it made no sense – but his instincts took over, smothering thought, and maintained a guard to knock away the next attack. It didn’t come. Proveux stepped back.

‘Halt,’ cried Saix from outside the circle. ‘What happened?’ he asked, approaching and helping Charles-Marie up.

‘Unsure,’ Charles-Marie said. ‘My bad knee gave out, I think. Wonderful timing.’

‘Can you continue?’

‘I must. How can I yield without a scratch upon my person?’

Nonetheless, Saix called over the physician, who fussed and clucked and bound the defective joint for whatever good that would do.

‘Back to your guard. Prepared? Begin.’

Proveux launched into a furious assault, and no less skilful for it. Charles-Marie parried three strikes in quick succession, fainting an attack of his own merely for the moment of respite it gave him. His footwork was slower. Less sure. Duels were won and lost with the feet just as often as with the arm. It did not bode well.

Bold and dexterous, Charles-Marie’s opponent slipped behind his guard until they were toe-to-toe and the lengths of their weapons an impediment rather than advantage. Each pulled back their sword arm, yet here age showed, slowing the movement by but a blink and yet that blink an eternity.

The sword took Charles-Marie in the leg. That same, already failing leg. The boy was ruthless and clever, then, as well as all the rest. The mark of the true fencing master. The thought passed in the moment after the sword bit but before the pain began.

‘Hit. Halt.’ Saix’s voice as he hurried over with the physician and helped Charles-Marie to hobble out of the circle.

‘How deep?’ Charles-Marie asked the physician inspecting and binding the cut. It was bleeding profusely, but in Charles-Marie’s experience even the smallest nicks could do that. The leg could still support his weight, he was sure.

‘Shallow enough, I think. Nonetheless, I would advise withdrawing.’

‘Advise or demand? May I continue or not?’

‘Against my advice, you may, sir.’

‘Then your advice is noted and disregarded. Commandant, help me up.’

Without voicing the opposition that was so clearly written on his face, Saix did as he was bid and announced that his principal would resume the fight.

‘Back to your guard.’ Charles-Marie grimaced as he dropped into the position. ‘Prepared? Begin.’

His footwork reduced to a shuffle, Charles-Marie let the thrill of the duel dull his pain as he parried the first attack and returned with his own. Seeing the boy’s sword rising to meet his own, Charles-Marie turned the strike into a faint and flanked Proveux’s blade to jab high. The boy’s reflexes saved him but he overcorrected – something to practice – and exposed a vulnerability.

Exploiting it, Charles-Marie kissed their blades together oh so softly, breaking the other man’s guard just enough to push through the questing point of his blade. It took Proveux on the outside of the forearm and scraped along, opening the skin in a long, neat line.

To his credit, the boy returned to his guard. Many a swordsman would have withdrawn the arm, leaving himself entirely vulnerable to a fatal follow up. Letting not a flicker of pain show, Proveux took two steps back and declared that he had been hit.

The halt was called and the two withdrew to their seconds. Charles-Marie accepted a few gulps of water and wiped the sweat from his face. The physician, he allowed to reexamine and readjust the bindings over his wound.

From across the length of the field of honour, he caught and held his opponent’s eye.

‘We could reconcile with honour, young sir. Few have lasted so long against me.’

Proveux smiled. ‘No, sir. Not for my life. I am ready to return to the field.’

The ritual once more: principals to their places, guard and prepare and begin, and then the flash of steel. Charles-Marie waited to receive the attack, wondering if the youth might be more cautious with his injured sword arm. No such luck. Yet it was slower, and moving the wrist caused some considerable pain if Proveux’s knotted brow was anything to go by.

Proveux lunged, forcing Charles-Marie back onto his bad leg. He took another step away in spite of the pain, turned on the ball of his foot, and launched himself forwards. Parry, riposte. Question, answer. Insult, retort.

Charles-Marie struck again and Proveux deflected it with a sidestep before attacking from his new angle. The older man’s slowing feet were showing and he was forced to weather another quick succession of attacks, parrying each one less convincingly than the last, his body twisted awkwardly.

Another strike. Charles-Marie managed to get his sword to it but without enough conviction to push it entirely away. Proveux lunged into it and took Charles-Marie in the breast, just below to collar.

Gasping, Charles-Marie heard Saix call the halt. The cut was deep. He had enough experience to know that without needing confirmation. The confirmation came nonetheless.

‘Sir,’ said the physician, ‘I would once again advise a withdrawal. This wound is serious.’

‘I must concur,’ Saix added. ‘You fought well. It is time to admit defeat.’

‘I’m not sure I know how,’ Charles-Marie admitted. ‘No. I cannot. Bind me up, tight as you can, and let me back at him.’

The principals returned, a note of surprise in Proveux’s eye.

‘Are you sure, sir?’ asked the young duellist.

‘Worry for your own person and let me concern myself with mine,’ Charles-Marie replied.

Saix called the resumption and Charles-Marie forced himself to strike first, beginning an offensive that used every trick he had learnt through years of experience to make up for the fatigue and pain – and oh was there pain.

The boy was slow to parry high. The fault of the injuries to his arm, no doubt. A low faint and then a strike at the vulnerability. Proveux’s feet saved him where his sword arm failed, moving off Charles-Marie’s line and countering with a vicious strike at the arm.

Charles-Marie had no time to parry but, blessedly, the attack caught his sword’s guard. Proveux followed up but Charles-Marie was prepared to block, and then again, yet was forced to give ground until he felt one of the perimeter stones against his heel.

Unable to step any further back, Charles-Marie struck, hoping to force Proveux back but the strike was weak and the young man stood his ground and parried. The slim chances of scoring a hit were growing slimmer. Was he merely waiting for the boy to kill him? Would that be better than marring his reputation?

Anger at the thought fuelled him for one last effort. Charles-Marie went for that same vulnerability he had noticed again. This time, it appeared, the youth was prepared for it.

The response was a wonder. A masterwork. Half a step back and to the side. A parry light yet forceful, like the wind. A flash of the wrist, faster than the eye could track. And a determined jab that slipped through Charles-Marie’s defences to bury the point into his forearm.

Charles-Marie collapsed, his sword discarded, clutching the wound.

‘Hilt,’ cried Saix. ‘Halt!’

All crowded around him and the physician set to work, tutting as he inspected and dressed the limb.

‘Can you move your fingers?’ the man asked.

Charles-Marie tried.

‘With pain,’ he replied.

‘Grip my hand.’

Again, he tried.

‘Little force. Sirs, the Lord Eppay is, I fear, unable to hold a sword any longer. He must withdraw.’

There was anger and there was acceptance and there was, though it made Charles-Marie feel half a coward, relief. He let his head fall back in exhaustion.

‘Thank you,’ said someone above him.

Charles-Marie forced himself to sit back up. It was the victor. He wore a daring smile and, as he knelt beside his opponent, brushed away the curls plastered to his forehead with sweat. Light, he seemed, and joyful. Unlike Charles-Marie had seen him thus far, and yet it seemed closer to his natural disposition than the grim anger and resentment.

‘Thank you,’ he repeated. ‘You taught me much, these past minutes. I am almost sorry to have forced your withdrawal.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Charles-Marie replied, hoping to show levity even through the pain. He inhaled sharply as the physician tightened a bandage. ‘This will give you a reputation. Use it well.’

The boy’s smile widened.

‘But it won’t matter in the end,’ continued Charles-Marie. The smile faded. ‘It’ll fascinate them, and perhaps reflect poorly on myself. But they’ll still see the southern bastard. Fight them all, kill them all, it’ll only make them hate you.’

‘You may be right,’ the youth said softly. And there was bitterness again, and something sadder too.

‘They’re silly, these prejudices. But they are the price we pay for an ordered society.’

‘If that is so, the price is too high, I think. Too ready accepted by those who do not have to bear them.’

‘Perhaps. But what can any of us do to change that?’

The young man shrugged.

‘Something,’ he suggested. ‘Everything.’

A brief glance and Charles-Marie saw something in the other man’s eyes. Something to make his heart sing and to grip it with terror. Something. Everything.

Lord il’Prolais came up behind the victor and clasped him on the shoulder and shared a laugh with him, and whatever Charles-Marie had seen was broken. But it stayed with him, and as the two boys – one half-foreign and of dubious lineage, the other with the blood of their sovereign ruler – walked away, he saw them showered in wreaths and he saw them consumed by fire.

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Thank you for reading. It behooves me to mention that the character of Viscount Proveux, later to go by the name of Thomas Dumas, is inspired by the real historical figure General Alex Dumas, famous as the only black man ever to attain the highest rank in the French army. This story is inspired by two incidents from his early life: his fencing bout against the Chevalier de Saint-Georges and a racist attack he suffered at the theatre. If you enjoyed this story and would like to read more like it, feel more than welcome to subscribe.

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In two weeks, I’ll be expanded on the theme of duelling to post a longform article on the early modern duel and the culture of honour that it existed within, and which was another large inspiration in this particular story. Two weeks after that, I think I’ll be returning to naval fiction with the story Fortune’s Favour, a cat-and-mouse chase on the high seas.

Looking for direction as you read through my stories and articles? Look no further:

The UK today is a mess of archaic idiosyncrasies, in particular in its government. Ultimately, unlike every other country in the entire world, we haven’t had a major upset to our government — of the type that would lead to its wholesale rewriting — since the 17th century. As I discussed in my last non-fiction post on the French Republican Calendar, societies suffer from a kind of inertia and, devoid of any subsequent revolutionary period, that inertia has been stronger in the UK than almost anywhere else. As a result, the UK is one of only two sovereign states to not have a formal written constitution (along with New Zealand) and retains the monarchy and the peerage and a whole host of odd sinecures. (I’ll be making reference here to positions like the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Lord Privy Seal, and Earl Marshal. In your own time, you can look up the likes of Black Rod, the Lord Mayor of London — not the same thing as the Mayor of London, of course — and the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds.)

For the most part, these features are irrelevant today and, in practice, Britain is a liberal democracy and the archetypical parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Bagehot, in his The English Constitution (by far the most influential work on the topic), dismissed models from other countries like the three branches of government or checks-and-balances and instead laid out that, at least in Britain, the most important constitutional division is between the ‘dignified’ and the ‘effective’. That is, between the purely ceremonial parts of the constitution and those that actually do the governing. These old idiosyncrasies are dignified: they seek to impress and awe and, in doing so, grant legitimacy to the effective government.1 On the other hand, the actual way the country is governed is the effective element. The head of the dignified government is the monarch. The head of the effective government is the prime minister.

Bagehot was writing in the second half of the 19th century. (The English Constitution was published originally in serial between 1865 and 1867.) The distinction he draws is one that makes sense to this day yet, in his own time, was remarkably recent. Only a few decades earlier, the monarch was an active participant in politics, not merely a dignified figurehead. The House of Lords, which Bagehot identifies with the dignified, was just as powerful, if not more so, than the House of Commons. In other words, there was a time — not long before Bagehot was writing — when dignified and effective were one of the same. A time when these strange ‘dignified’ holdovers were integral parts of the functioning of the effective government, slowly losing their power.

In this post, we’ll be exploring and explaining the politics and government of that transition-time in British history.

When, Exactly?

I’m using the term ‘early modern’ but I’m going to discuss a more specific period than that.

In England, the end of the medieval era is usually dated to the reign of Henry VIII. If we want a year, we can take 1534: the year Henry was officially made head of the Church of England under the First Act of Supremacy. More generally, though, the end of the medieval era is often dated to 1492, the year of Columbus’s first crossing. With the end of the medieval era, we officially transition into the early modern. But this is the early-early-modern era, a period of transition out of the medieval, in which politics and government don’t look particularly modern at all.

The end of the period, when the ‘early’ part of ‘early modern’ gets dropped, is usually placed sometime in the late-18th or early-19th century. The beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, for example. In Britain, we can talk about the beginning of the industrial revolution — though then we have to reach for a date, which could be any year you like in the back-half of the 18th-century. If we want a more concrete date, maybe we can say that the Regency era was the first distinctly modern era in Britain. If so, we’ll again be scrambling for a specific year. The formal permanent regency on behalf of King George III began in 1811, but the wider period is usually dated to have begun around 1795.

Periodisation, as always, is a bit of a fool’s game. Useful in generalities, it loses that usefulness the moment it’s used prescriptively rather than descriptively, or when we attempt to solidify a period’s fuzzy boundaries.

Here, I want to talk about a more specific period which overlaps the early modern and the, well, modern-modern. In particular, the period we could call the ‘gentry oligarchy’ (my term), after the total rise of Parliament’s power (and thereby decline of royal power) but before the transition of that gentry oligarchy into something approaching a modern mass democracy. The last period in which we cannot divide the dignified from the effective; in which those now entirely dignified elements were slowly losing their effectivity.

When is that period? I’m going to take the specific years of 1660-1832, from Restoration to Reform. (It alliterates, so you know there’s something to it.) 1660 is the date of the restoration of the monarchy: the end of Britain’s republican experiment and the return of the Stuart royal house. Post-Civil Wars, Parliament had proven that it, not the monarch, ultimately called the shots. It would drive the message home soon after in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This was, in all imaginable ways, the beginning of modern British government.

1832, on the other hand, is the date of the passing of the Great Reform Act. This act radically changed the makeup of the House of Commons (whose English constituencies hadn’t been altered since the Restoration), in particular eliminating the ‘rotten boroughs’ that made the gentry oligarchy possible and paving the way for mass democracy. It was also just five years later that Queen Victoria came to the throne: the first monarch to truly attain the ‘dignified’ ideal and take almost no part in the effective side of government.

This is, furthermore, the period in which British politics was defined by the rivalry of two factions: the Whigs and Tories, which initially emerged as the Country Party and Court Party respectively during the Restoration period. The Tories would be replaced by the modern Conservative Party in 1834, though the Whigs didn’t metamorphise into the Liberal Party until 1859.

What, Exactly?

The other issue we need to clear up is nomenclature. You see, in 1660, the area under the rule of the restored King Charles II was divided into three kingdoms: England (which included Wales), Scotland, and Ireland. England was dominant, Scotland largely free to govern itself domestically but required to follow English foreign policy, and Ireland not dissimilar from a colony, but nonetheless they were three legally different states.

This changed with the Act of Union 1707, which merged the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain. Then it changed again with the Act of Union 1801, which merged Ireland into the union to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

As a result, terminology will have to be used rather fluidly. In the early period, I’ll be mostly talking about England but noting the separate if related existence of Scotland and Ireland. Later, the term Britain can be introduced, though England and Scotland (and, after its inclusion in the union, Ireland), will still need to be occasionally discussed separately as they were often treated and governed very differently.

So, now that we know what we’re talking about and when we’re talking about, it might behoove us to start talking about it.

Parliament

The heart of British politics was and is Parliament. I talked through the origins of Parliament and its two chambers during my English aristocracy post, so feel free to check back and jog your memory but, basically, it formed as a forum for discussion (Parliament coming from the French ‘parler’ meaning ‘to talk’) between the king and those major figures he relied on in the clergy, urban centres, and — most notably — amongst the landowners who would grow into the nobility and gentry. In other words, it emerged as the English version of the medieval ‘three estates’, similar to the French estates general.

Where it differs from continental institutions of the same type is the power that Parliament amassed and retained. Where the French kings could entirely dismiss the estates general, leading to its effective dissolution for the entire 18th-century up until the beginning of the 1789 Revolution, Parliament in England, Scotland, and post-conquest Ireland became an integral part of the operation of the government. Laws were passed not by royal decree but by Act of Parliament. Taxes, in particular, were Parliament’s exclusive domain. And, when Charles I attempted to govern without Parliament, it led to the English Civil Wars and a decade-long experiment with republican government.

When the monarchy returned 1660, it was at Parliament’s invitation. The monarchy was not entirely cowed — we’ll discuss 1688 later — but it was clear that, when push came to shove, it was Parliament that did the shoving and the monarch who lay battered in the dirt. In most countries, ultimate sovereignty — the last constitutional appeal — lies in the document of the constitution itself. In Britain ever since this period (and, in particular, since the Glorious Revolution), ultimate sovereignty instead has lain with Parliament (the concept of Parliamentary Sovereignty). This means, when all is said and done, that what Parliament says goes and there are no constitutional limits on Parliamentary power. If Parliament passes a law to say that the moon is made of cheese then, from the perspective of British law, the only question remains what kind of crackers would be best to serve with it.

Parliament’s two chambers are called the House of Commons and House of Lords. Both must pass a bill for it to be presented to the monarch, at which point it receives royal assent and became an Act of Parliament. (And thereby law.) Royal assent is a technicality today, and has been since the Hanoverians came to the throne in 1714. However, before this, monarchs did occasionally refuse to grant their assent to bills. The last monarch to do so was Queen Anne who, in 1708, refused assent to the Scottish Militia Bill2. Another effective monarchical veto was the ability to entirely dismiss Parliament, but that power was set aside after 1688. Even before the monarchy as a whole became merely dignified, then, the monarchical veto was a power that had long stopped being ‘effective’, de facto removing the monarch’s main role in Parliament.

The House of Lords

The House of Lords was made up of two groups called the Lords Temporal and Lords Spiritual. The Lords Temporal referred to everyone with a peerage title: all those barons, viscounts, earls, marquesses, and dukes I discussed at so much length in my earlier article. For the purposes of the Lords, the rank differences between the titles were meaningless: all got the same, single vote. This also means that all those royal dukes got a seat in the Lords, including the heir to the throne. Overtime, however, as the royal family shifted from effective to dignified, it became less and less common for them to actually attend and vote.

However, it wasn’t always as simple as that. Specifically, there were the special cases of representative peers and writs of acceleration. First, representative peers. You see, all English peers had the right to attend the House of Lords. After the acts of union, English peers feared being flooded by those of the other nations (in particular Scotland, which had roughly as many peers as England despite a much smaller population). So, instead of all the preexisting peers from Scotland and Ireland being allowed to attend, they had to select a subset of their number to attend the Lords on their behalf — 16 from Scotland and 28 from Ireland. The Scottish ones were newly elected each Parliament, while the Irish ones only got replaced when a previous representative peer died. This was, strangely, a semi-democratic element within the House of Lords, albeit reserved for the nobility. After the Acts of Union, newly created peers were British peers rather than English, Scottish, or Irish, with an automatic right to sit in the Lords just like the English peers.

Secondly, writs of acceleration were a mechanism to temporarily increase the size of the Lords by giving an English or British peer’s son and heir the right to attend as well. He would be allowed to attend one day, when his inherited his father’s titles, so this writ merely accelerated his right to do so. The formal mechanism was to issue a writ of summons to this heir apparent as if he actually held one of his father’s lower ranked titles (a baron title was almost always chosen, as the lowest ranked of the titles, so the accelerated heir wouldn’t take precedence over any higher ranked actual peers). Then, he got to sit in the Lords just as if he actually held that peerage title. Why do this? Mostly as a political move: if the government needed a bit more support in the Lords, but you didn’t want to permanently increase the number of lords by creating new peers, then you might use writs of acceleration to temporarily increase the number of government supporters. In my previous article, we briefly brought up the idea of ‘flooding the Lords’ — creating enough new Lords to pass legislation the existing Lords were hostile to. Well, this was a softer way of doing that.

The Lords Spiritual, on the other hand, were the 26 bishops of the Church of England. Even after the merger of England and Scotland in 1707, only English bishops sat in the Lords because the Presbyterian Kirk up in Scotland didn’t have bishops. On the other hand, the Church of Ireland (meaning the Anglican Church in Ireland, rather than the Catholic Church in Ireland to which most Irish belonged) did get to send four Lords Spiritual to the House of Lords after the merger of Ireland into the British state in 1801, making a total of 30. As you can imagine in the heavily class-based society of early modern Britain, these bishops were pretty much always drawn from the upper classes — not least because bishops were selected by the government, which was itself dominated by gentlemen.

The House of Lords, being where all the nobles and bishops got together, also had a number of other powers above and beyond the House of Commons, in particular of a legal nature. It was the highest court of law in the land (separation of powers being, at this point, a foreign concept to Britain — as Bagehot pointed out) except in Scotland, which had its own system. Nobles could only be tried before a jury of other nobles drawn from the Lords. If royal officials were impeached, they were tried by the Commons before the Lords. (Modern Britain has dropped this practice, but it continues as the inspiration for the very similar impeachment process in the United States.)3

The House of Commons

The House of Commons was, on the other hand, the elected house. However, both the terms ‘elected’ and ‘commons’ should be taken with heaps of salt during this period. As mentioned in my previous article, ‘common’ in Britain merely means ‘not noble’ — i.e. anyone who doesn’t have a peerage title, which is all but a few hundred people. Rich landed gentry, even the children or siblings of nobles, are legally common. It was they who made up most of this more democratic house. Similarly, the ‘elected’ element should be heavily caveated. The modern House of Commons is split into 650 roughly equal-sized constituencies, each sending a single representative elected by universal adult suffrage. The House of Commons of this time, on the other hand, was very different.

First, there’s the constituencies. The right to send members of parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons was granted to different places and institutions over the course of the medieval and early modern era. Each of England’s traditional 39 counties got to send two representatives, called Knights of the Shire4. A number of boroughs (urban areas — towns or cities) also got to send (usually) two representatives called burgesses. (A few sent one representative instead, and two — the City of London and Weymouth & Melcombe Regis, which was originally two boroughs that got merged — got to send four.) However, these boroughs had mostly been named in the medieval era. Many large towns in the 18th-century didn’t have representation as a borough (instead merely forming part of a larger county) and many of the existing boroughs had overtime become depopulated. As time went on, the situation only got worse. These depopulated boroughs are what were called the ‘rotten boroughs’ — those with tiny electorates, often completely controlled by the main landowner who could tell the few residents how to vote. (Britain didn’t have the secret ballot until 1872.) The vast majority of English constituencies were boroughs, and many of them were rotten.

Next, the Cinque Ports (originally five and later eight towns on the south-east coast that during the medieval period had responsibility for defending against invasion) operated mostly like boroughs (all with two representatives) except they got to be special and call their representatives ‘barons’. Finally, the universities of Cambridge and Oxford also got to send two representatives.

In Wales, Scotland (after the Act of Union 1707), and Ireland (after the Act of Union 1801), a similar system of county and borough representation was used to send representatives to what was now no longer the English but the British Parliament. However, their counties and boroughs were usually only able to send one representative each. Irish counties sent two representatives, as did the Welsh county of Monmouthshire — which was sorta kinda considered both Welsh and English. Dublin and Cork were the only Irish boroughs allowed to send two representatives, while the University of Dublin was the only university outside of England allowed to send representatives, but it only got to send one of them. Scotland, though it only sent one representative for each of its boroughs and counties, actually had rather a lot of them: 30 Scottish counties compared to the 39 English ones and 32 Irish ones, despite Scotland’s much smaller population.

As we can see, then, representation was not equally distributed. Some boroughs were made up of fewer than a hundred voters, others many thousands. Some counties were many times larger than other counties. Some cities had no specific representation at all. And, comparing the four countries that eventually made up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by the end of our period, England was by far the most overrepresented while Ireland was by far the most underrepresented. Even within England, representation was shifted south, leaving the rapidly growing and industrialising north comparatively underrepresented.

And then there’s the franchise. In each of these different kinds of constituency, the requirements for voting were different but usually amounted to some kind of property qualification. In the counties, for example, you had to own property worth forty shillings (two pounds). Over time, the franchise naturally increased due to inflation — as the buying power of the pound decreased, more and more properties would exceed that two pound threshold. The exception to this was Scotland, where the property qualification took inflation into account by saying that the property had to have been worth two pounds since the Middle Ages. Scotland had, therefore, by far the most restricted county franchise.

The boroughs used one of a number of different systems to determine who could vote. Freeman boroughs, the most numerous, gave a vote to every freeman of the borough, hence the name. What’s a freeman of the borough? Well, it depends on the borough. In general, most men of the property owning classes or in the guild system could expect to be freemen. Other methods looked at, for example, whether you paid certain taxes, owned certain types of property, or — in the famous ‘potwalloper’ boroughs — if you owned a pot and fireplace.

In the university constituencies, all graduates with master’s or higher degree got a vote. (Importantly, the actual students didn’t get a vote until they earnt a graduate degree, which many didn’t.) These were mostly wealthy gentlemen or men of the professional classes like lawyers, doctors, and clergymen. Also, they got to vote twice: once in their university and once where they lived. Actually, they may have got to vote even more than that, because you could vote in every constituency where you met the requirements. If you owned land worth forty shillings in multiple counties, you could vote in all of them.

Another important restriction to the franchise, in particular impacting Ireland, was the disenfranchisement of Catholics. In England, Wales and Ireland, the Anglican Church was the state religion throughout our period but, for the most part, nonconformists (also known as dissenters: non-Anglican protestants, such as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers) didn’t suffer too much in the way of overt discrimination. In Scotland, there was a similar system except that the established church was a Presbyterian one. But, across the country, Catholicism specifically was strongly legally discriminated against. Catholics couldn’t hold public office and weren’t even allowed to own property, meaning that they definitionally couldn’t meet the property qualification for voting. In majority-Catholic Ireland, then, only the small protestant minority (many of whom were the descendants of English and Scottish immigrants) actually got to participate in the electoral process.

This began to change in the late-18th century with the slow process called Catholic emancipation, which wasn’t completed until the early-19th century, right at the end of our period. Slowly, Catholics were allowed to own property, then hold public office, and restrictions on the activities of the Catholic church were lifted. This should have led to a huge increase in the franchise in Ireland but, to offset this, the property qualifications to vote in Ireland were raised (from two pounds to ten pounds) to keep the electorate limited and weighted towards the wealthy protestant landowning class.

Throughout this period, then, the House of Commons was anything but democratic. Its elections were largely managed by local magnates who often literally spoke about ‘owning’ certain constituencies. The franchise was, in most constituencies, tiny. And, in particular, voting power was skewed towards the rich, Anglican, and English. (And, it goes without saying, male.) However, the system also differed hugely constituency by constituency and some — in particular the larger boroughs — did frequently have contested elections that operated under a system approaching democracy. Yet, these exceptions merely proved the rule. This, more than anything else, is the key to why this period should best be understood, to again use my own term, as one of ‘gentry oligarchy’.

HM’s Government

Putting aside Parliament, the other core part of the government was what under the three-branches model is called the ‘executive’. That is, the monarch’s ministers and the bureaucratic apparatus that supported them; that part of the wider government that is often colloquially referred to by itself merely as the government. In the UK, this is referred to as His or Her Majesty’s Government to emphasise that it is a government in the name of the monarch.

No-one governs alone, and so the monarch has always had people we can broadly call ministers who were responsible for different parts of the apparatus of government. Over the course of the medieval era, this developed into the Great Officers of State in both England and Scotland. Furthermore, there was the privy council (of which the great officers and others were members), to advise the monarch and collectively undertake some royal functions that the monarch wished to delegate.

Let’s take a look at the English system, which effectively transitioned into the British system after the Act of Union 1707. By the Restoration, some of these great officers were still ‘effective’. The Lord High Treasurer was the head of the treasury and equivalent of a finance minister. The Lord High Chancellor administered the judicial system — like a justice minister — and presided over the House of Lords. The Lord High Admiral ran the navy.

Other great officers were still used as political posts but had become sinecures used to give influential politicians a seat in the privy council. These were the Lord President of the Council (whose official duties were to chair meetings of the privy council) and Lord Privy Seal (officially the keeper of the royal seal). The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, despite not being a great officer, was an appointment that was used to exactly the same effect.

Still other great officers had fallen out of political utility altogether and become purely dignified offices. The Earl Marshal and Lord Great Chamberlain had already become a hereditary positions. The Lord High Steward and Lord High Constable were positions only filled temporarily at coronations.5

However, those few still effective great officers didn’t cover all the functions of government. Notably, the army lacked a single responsible minister. Command of the army was held either by the monarch personally, or by an appointed commander-in-chief, or by a council of generals, often assisted administratively by a ‘secretary at war’ along with figures like the paymaster of the forces and master-general of the ordinance (but, overall, the army lacked a single centralised bureaucracy at this time). Other functions of the government came under the personal remit of the monarch, assisted from the time of the Tudors by a ‘principal secretary’ or ‘secretary of state’, who became a more and more independent minister.

With the Restoration of 1660, and the beginning of our period, this role was cleft in twain and England got its first two modern government departments: the Northern Department and Southern Department, each led by their own separate secretary of state. That is to say, administration was divided not based on responsibility but based on geography. More baffling, so was foreign affairs. The Northern Department got to conduct foreign affairs with northern and eastern Europe, while the Southern Department got the rest of Europe and everything outside of Europe (including all the colonies). An absurd system, and yet it was kept for over a century.

The last important government position I should mention is that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who governed that kingdom as a viceroy. The Lord Lieutenant was more than merely a minister: they exercised near all royal authority in Ireland on behalf of the monarch. The Lord Lieutenant ruled from Ireland itself, and so Irish affairs back in England were usually represented by a subordinate minister: the Secretary of State for Ireland and/or Chief Secretary for Ireland.

Scotland had its own system until the 1707 union, after which there was a Secretary of State for Scotland to match the Northern and Southern Secretaries down in England (You’re all southern to me!, the Scotts presumably cried). The position wasn’t always filled, however, and was abolished after the Jacobite Rising of 1745.

With most of the great officers and privy council becoming more dignified than effective, these ministers — the Lord Treasurer, Lord Chancellor, Lord Admiral, Northern Secretary, Southern Secretary, and whoever was leading the army at the time — began to form their own more informal council. Soon, this would be called the cabinet, though for a long time it had no official legal status. The Lord Lieutenant or Secretary for Ireland were sometimes considered part of this cabinet, as was, a little later, the Secretary of State for Scotland (if there was one).

Coming to the throne in 1702 and presiding over the legal union of England and Scotland in 1707, Queen Anne made an important change to this system (at least in terms of what people got called) when she decided to put the positions of Lord Treasurer and Lord Admiral into commission. That is, she declined to appoint any single person to those positions and instead instituted a commission (of generally half a dozen people) to exercise them collectively, referred to as the Lords of the Treasury/Admiralty. This move was intended to prevent any one person from dominating those incredibly important functions of the government and challenging royal influence but, because too many cooks spoil the broth, the two commissions soon came to be dominated by just one person each, given precedence as ‘first lord’ over his fellows. Furthermore, the First Lord of the Treasury was often simultaneously the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the guy specifically in charge of the government’s balance sheet). And I have to mention that the First Lord of the Admiralty was also known as the Senior Naval Lord, a frankly wonderful title. Later, they would instead be called the First Sea Lord.

The biggest shakeup to this executive system in our period was, of course, the rise of the prime ministers. There had long been a generally recognised chief minister — often a royal favourite. (Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII or the Duke of Buckingham to James I/VI and Charles I, for example.) However, with the emergence of the ‘prime minister’, this premier minister transitioned out of being the monarch’s chief underling into being, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the government in his own right. This was the beginning of the monarch’s transition into being a purely dignified role, though during this period the monarch still had a central role in choosing the PM and steering policy. Having said this, I should drive home that throughout our period the term ‘prime minister’ was still an entirely unofficial one. Generally recognised, yes. An actual formal role written into law, no.

The first of these prime ministers was Sir Robert Walpole, who dominated the government of Britain throughout the 1720s and ‘30s. How was it that Walpole managed to remove himself from the monarch’s shadow and become the driving force behind British government, setting the stage for all future prime ministers? Well, books have been written on the subject but broadly we can say this: first, this was the culmination of a slow (and far from complete) transition of power out of the monarch’s hands and, second, that the ascension to the throne of George I in 1714 was a major catalyst. George I was new to his realm, spoke little English, and was willing to be a very hands-off king: the perfect environment for a position like that of prime minister to emerge.

Now, as I said, ‘prime minister’ was not by an official position. Walpole’s actual role was as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Control of the treasury, however, gave him purview over all government expenses. Walpole, while running the treasury, could therefore use its influence to ensure his central position in British government.

Walpole fell from grace in 1741, but the position he had created survived. From then on, whoever was appointed as First Lord of the Treasury was recognised as prime minister: the leader of the government. Furthermore, the position was usually held along with that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, by convention, the chancellor had to sit in the House of Commons. So, if the First Lord of the Treasury was a peer (i.e., sat in the House of Lords) then the Second Lord of the Treasury would be appointed as chancellor instead. Not wanting to give away this role actually motivated some prime ministers to remain in the Commons, even if it meant refusing a peerage. Pitt the Younger’s ministries6, for example, were almost entirely made up of peers with the singular exception of himself — long after he could have accepted a peerage if he wanted one — because he wished to remain chancellor so as not to dilute his power.

Nonetheless, as the prime minister took on more and more of the general responsibility for running the country, the specific responsibility for running the treasury was more and more delegated to that Second Lord of the Treasury. Around the end of our period, the two positions were completely separated. From then on, it was the chancellor / second lord who was the British equivalent of a ‘finance minister’, while the prime minister lost any real role in the treasury despite still being appointed as its first lord.

This gets at another important new principle. In earlier periods, the king could appoint who they liked to whatever positions they liked. However, in our period, the convention began that ministers had to be directly responsible to Parliament, and so had to be members of Parliament themselves. That way, they would be in Parliament to defend themselves and listen to criticism. Which furthermore means that, if you can’t secure election to the House of Commons or a peerage into the House of Lords, you can’t serve as a government minister. This principle creates a cosier relationship between legislative and executive called ‘monism’, as opposed to the ‘dualist’ system (used, for example, in Netherlands) which attempts to maintain separation of powers even under a parliamentary democracy by keeping ministers outside of the legislature. 7

Besides the creation of the PM, a few changes were made to the cabinet throughout the 18th century. The big shakeup came in 1782, when the Northern and Southern Departments were transformed into the Foreign Office (responsible for foreign policy and led by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, or Foreign Secretary) and Home Office (responsible for domestic and colonial policy and led by the Secretary of State for the Home Department, or Home Secretary). ‘Domestic policy’ is a little vague, in particular because the government took on more and more responsibilities during and after our period. The modern Home Office, for example, is mostly responsible for policing, domestic security, immigration, and citizenship. When it was first created, public order was the main responsibility, which mostly meant managing the mess of militias and other forces that policed Britain at the time. Overseeing infrastructure and local officials were the other main competences. And, right at the end of our period, Britain began building a modern prison and policing system, which was also placed in the Home Office’s hands. Subsequently, when new departments were created, it was generally by splitting them off from the Home Office.

The other notable change was the army, which was put under a single administration in 1794 with the creation of the Secretary of State for War. In 1801, responsibility for the colonies was transferred from the Home Secretary to the War Secretary, who therefore became the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies.

Three other positions also deserve a mention as their holders were increasingly invited into the cabinet towards the end of our period. First, the President of the Board of Trade, who regulated — you guessed it — trade. Second, the confusingly similarly named President of the Board of Control, who oversaw the East India Company — the company that held Britain’s state-sanctioned monopoly on all trade to and from the Indian Ocean and which directly ruled an ever larger part of the Indian subcontinent as our period marched on. And, lastly, the Postmaster-General, who was responsible for the state-run postal system, which was the only public utility run by the government at the time.

To sum up, then, what did the cabinet look like at the very end of our period, in the early decades of the 19th century?

In the dominant position, the First Lord of the Treasury, informally known as the prime minister. The Second Lord of the Treasury / Chancellor of the Exchequer ran government finances. Then there was the Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Lord Chancellor, War and Colonies Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty. The positions of Lord President of the Council, Lord Privy Seal, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster were still always used to allow important figures a seat in cabinet without giving them a particular ministry. And finally there were those positions that were usually but not always allowed into cabinet: the three I just mentioned above along with someone representing Ireland. The Master-General of the Ordinance was also often invited, despite being subordinate to the War and Colonies Secretary.

Whigs and Tories

But what about the people actually engaged in politics during this period? What ideologies motivated them and what factionalism divided them? In other words, let’s discuss the Whigs and Tories.

The origin of these two factions — along with their names — can be found in the English Civil Wars and the early division into Parliamentarians (or ‘Roundheads’) and Royalists (or ‘Cavaliers’). During that era, the major division was based on whether a person supported Parliament in its fight to retain and expand its role in government or King Charles I in his fight to cow Parliament into submission or govern without it entirely. Once the political fight became a military one, it referred to the two sides in the Civil Wars.

However, the division of Parliamentarian and Royalist touched on more than merely royal authority. Most notably, it also intersected very strongly with religious views. Charles I was tolerant of Catholics, wanted to force the Presbyterian Scottish Kirk into becoming more like the Episcopal Anglican Church, and to prevent further reforms to the Church of England itself. Naturally, then, people who supported his religious agenda tended to align with the king.

On the other hand, many of the king’s detractors were those who wished to further reform the Anglican Church into a more Calvinist Presbyterian direction, similar to the Scottish Kirk. Most famously, this is the group called the Puritans, so-called because they wished to ‘purify’ the Anglican Church of what they saw as continuing Catholic influence. Many Parliamentarians, then, weren’t merely fearful of royal authority generally but were specifically fearful of Charles I attempting a counter-reformation and rallied to the Parliamentarian cause after the king tried to force the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on Scotland (causing the Bishops’ War and setting off the whole Civil Wars era).

One of the big religious differences here was church governance. Naturally, those who supported Presbyterian church governance — a more horizontal system where congregation leaders (presbyters) come together to discuss policy in synods and councils — wanted a similarly horizontal and discursive political system. On the other hand, supporters of absolutist royal authority naturally favoured the more strictly hierarchical Episcopal structure, in which the king passed down decrees to the bishops, who passed it down to the parish congregations. Ultimately, in the 17th century, religious policy was inseparable from wider political policy.8

After the Restoration, this was no different: the division merely awaited a new national issue to rally around. The Exclusion Crisis was that issue.

The Exclusion Crisis

After the Restoration, the new king was Charles II, son of the overthrown and executed Charles I. Charles II had lots of children but, unfortunately, none of them were by the woman he was legally married to. (Though not for lack of trying.) As such, his acknowledged heir was his brother James.

James, however, had converted to Catholicism sometime in the late 1660s, a fact that was formally acknowledged a few years later. Now, no matter what kind of Anglican (or nonconformist) you were, pretty much all British protestants hated Catholics with the burning intensity of a witch-pyre. Catholics, as mentioned, weren’t even allowed to own property. A Catholic monarch was, therefore, a problem. Furthermore, Charles II’s queen consort was a Catholic and the whole Stuart family were pretty friendly towards Catholics, in particular Catholic France, which further fed into a narrative that the post-Restoration monarchy was a little too Popish for comfort.9

Luckily, James had two properly Anglican daughters — Mary and Anne — by his late first wife. So, if James could somehow be passed over, the throne could next go to his daughter (or one of Charles II’s many illegitimate sons, such as the Duke of Monmouth) without ever needing to fall into Catholic hands.

In 1679, therefore, a bill was introduced to Parliament to ‘exclude’ James from the succession. To prevent the bill from passing, Charles dissolved Parliament. Then the same thing happened to the next Parliament, of 1680, and the one after that, of 1681. The exclusion efforts were spearheaded by the Earl of Shaftsbury, whose faction were known as the Country Party.

On the other hand were those who mostly hated Catholics just as much as the Country Party but nonetheless believed that Parliament was attempting to go far beyond its authority. The succession is determined by God, not Parliament, they argued. As such, they supported the royal brothers and were known as the Court Party. But God is an Anglican, so how could he ever want a Catholic on the throne?, the Country Party countered. As before, religious views were intrinsically interlinked with views on royal vs Parliamentary power.

That these factions mirrored those of the Civil War wasn’t lost on anyone, and so soon they were given nicknames inspired by groups from that bloody period, still well within living memory. The Country Party were called the Whigs, referring to a particularly radical kind of Scottish Presbyterian. The Court Party were called the Tories, referencing pro-royalist (and Catholic) Irish guerrilla fighters. Initially disparaging, both labels were eventually taken on as the main name for the factions, used even by their supporters.

And these weren’t mere political factions, but societal divisions in a kind of ‘culture war’. Your stereotypical Whig was, like the Puritans they had replaced, austere, frugal, moralising, of the middle classes or lower gentry, and of course of a more radically protestant persuasion. Your stereotypical Tory, on the other hand, was an old aristocrat with a sword in one hand and bottle of wine in the other, paternalistic and debauching, and a firm believer in tradition and the established Church.

The Glorious Revolution

The Exclusion Crisis itself came to nothing, except that it set the stage for 1688. After James succeeded his brother as King James II (or VII, in Scotland) in 1685, the Whigs were willing to accept it. What were they going to do, overthrow the king? Because that went so well the last time we tried it.10 Besides, the heir was Princess Mary, a protestant married to a protestant, so Catholic monarchy only had to be endured for so long.

Except then, in 1688, James II had a son, who thereby supplanted his sisters in the line of succession. A son who would be raised a Catholic. The beginning, potentially, of a Catholic dynasty on the English, Scottish, and Irish thrones. It was far, far too much. Even many Tories, otherwise supporters of royal authority who were suspicious of Parliament growing too powerful, baulked at the idea.

So, various Whigs and Tories worked together (the Whigs gleefully, the Tories rather less so) to plot James’s downfall. They invited Princess Mary’s husband, Prince William of Orange, de facto ruler of the Dutch Republic, to land an army and take the throne. They ensured the royal army wouldn’t oppose the transfer of power and that Parliament would rubber stamp it. What followed was something between a coup, an invasion, and a revolution. To history, it is called the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and it was at this point that Parliamentary sovereignty was fully established — the idea that Parliament, not the monarch, has the final constitutional word. This transfer of power, however, was not entirely uncontested. In Ireland, it led to the brutally destructive Williamite War and, in Scotland, to various Jacobite rebellions.

The Glorious Revolution was a major upset for the emerging factional system. The new co-monarchs William III and Mary II generally favoured Whigs and pushed Tories out of influence, given the lingering suspicion that Tories favoured the return of James II (the cause known as ‘Jacobitism’ which was particularly strong in the Catholic stronghold of the Scottish highlands) and were either more conservative in their Anglicanism or even out-and-out Catholics. (William, on the other hand, was a Dutch Presbyterian, a Calvinist more in line with the Scottish Kirk than Anglican Church.)

That situation was completely reversed after the deaths of Mary and then William, when Mary’s sister Anne took the throne. She recognised that the Whigs were still the faction of Parliamentary power and so the monarch’s natural allies were to be found amongst the Tories. Under her influence, Tories would often dominate the government, though they could never entirely overshadow the Whigs.

Whig Supremacy

Fundamentally, the stain of Jacobitism was difficult for the Tories to wipe out and, furthermore, true old school Tories of the type who still didn’t recognise Parliamentary sovereignty had a hard time operating in Britain’s new political milieu.

In 1714, Queen Anne died. Like her sister, she had no surviving children and so, thanks to the convoluted succession Parliament had instituted to avoid a Catholic king, the throne passed to the Hanoverian King George I. Immediately, there was a Jacobite rebellion in 1715, then an attempted Jacobite invasion in 1719, and a Jacobite conspiracy in 1721. It all thoroughly convinced George I that Jacobitism was a real and present threat to his reign and that the potentially Jacobite Tories should be allowed nowhere near the reins of power. The Whigs, therefore, were given a near total monopoly on political offices which lasted until 1760, a period that is known as the Whig Supremacy or Whig Oligarchy. Throughout this period, the Tories were a small rump faction and the major division was between different kinds of Whigs who rallied around different influential leaders.

Having established himself as the first prime minister in 1721, Walpole remained at the top of British politics for two decades. However, opposition to him grew, in particular due to his corruption and cronyism. Whigs who opposed him, most notably the Earl of Bath and Pitt the Elder, united under the label ‘Patriot Whig’ and together with the Tories and even more radical Whigs — the Commonwealthmen — formed the loose ‘Country Party’ alliance. In 1742, they were able to defeat Walpole in a confidence motion by a single vote, forcing him to resign.

The opposition, however, was too disunited to govern. After less than two years, the Pelham brothers — previously close allies of Walpole — were able to wrestle back control. Henry Pelham was the real leader of the two but, when he died in 1754, his brother Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, took over. Newcastle’s bungling of the Seven Years War allowed the Patriot Whigs another shot at government but they were too few in number to form a stable government and, even more critically, George II just really didn’t like Pitt the Elder. Eventually, Newcastle had to be recalled, governing in coalition with his old rival Pitt. Throughout all of this, the Tories didn’t even get a whiff of power.

Tory Resurgence

The Tories as they had been would never recover. Tory, to many, still meant someone who rejected the post-1688 constitutional arrangements and preferred an absolutist monarch. So, even when the Tories began to gain power again, it wasn’t really under the Tory label. Influential ‘Tory’ leaders rarely used that word to describe themselves. Instead, using terms like ‘Independent Whig’, they would unite true blue Tories with Whigs of a more conservative persuasion. The term ‘Tory’ had, effectively, become one of disparagement, associated with the most reactionary wing of British politics, and it would take time for it to again be adopted as a neutral party label.

Nonetheless, the Tories would return to power. It began when George III ascended to the throne in 1760 and made no secret of his dislike for the Whig leadership of Newcastle and Pitt the Elder. Instead, he favoured his old tutor, Lord Bute. With royal backing, Bute was able to oust the Whig leaders and govern with the support of Tories and disaffected Whigs like the Duke of Bedford’s faction. Today, Bute is usually seen as the first Tory prime minister.

Bute could take power, but he couldn’t keep it. Though the Seven Years War ended under his leadership, there was widespread opposition to the resultant peace treaty, seen by Bute’s opponents as not harsh enough to the defeated powers. Bute had to resign, leaving another, more Whiggish, man to lead his Tory-Whig alliance. Opposing them were, still, Pitt the Elder, as well as the old Pelham faction, which had come under the leadership of the Marquess of Rockingham.

Even with Bute gone, the government soon fell and Rockingham and Pitt each got a stint governing the country, despite George III’s personal distain for them. What George wanted was another Bute: a more conservative man who could hold together a coalition of true Tories with those Whigs willing to align with them. In Lord North, he found his man.

North’s twelve year premiership is mostly known today for the American War of Independence, which he in many ways both caused and lost. Indeed, the thing that finally forced his resignation was Britain’s imminent defeat in the war. Nonetheless, his ministry was a watershed moment, as he was the first man to hold together a stable government of Tories and certain Whig factions, and it was this alliance that dominated politics in the late-18th and into the early-19th century.

After North’s fall, the mainstream Whigs tried to govern alone but, just a few months later, were forced out by a coalition of North’s supporters united with the most radical Whigs under Charles James Fox. It was a coalition that couldn’t last, however, in particular thanks to the king’s personal intervention, stirring up the Lords against his own government. In 1783, Pitt the Younger, son and political heir to Pitt the Elder, was invited to form an alternative ministry.

United by a small-c conservatism, Pitt the Younger held together an alliance of Tories and various factions of Whigs, similar to those of North and Bute before him. Soon, they were further united by an aggressive foreign policy towards Revolutionary, later Napoleonic, France, though on some issues, like slave trade abolition and Catholic emancipation, Pitt’s government was divided. (Pitt himself favoured both.) Opposite them were the more radical and reformist Whigs under Charles James Fox’s leadership. Yet, the Foxite Whigs were a rump faction whose support for Parliamentary Reform, full freedom of worship, the American and French Revolutions, and the abolition of slavery went far beyond the political mainstream of the time.

Nonetheless, this was a time when personality mattered more than party and, after being held together for over two decades by Pitt the Younger, the alliance was leaderless after his death in 1806. In the aftermath, three prime ministers quickly rose and fell, including an attempt at a wartime all-faction coalition which, thanks to its inclusion of the Foxite Whigs11, abolished the slave trade in 1807.

It took six years for the more conservative factions to reunite behind a single leader, Lord Liverpool, who continued to lead them until 1827, at which point he resigned owing to ill-health, and died shortly thereafter. Predictably, this lead to another leaderless period in which none could hold together the Tories and conservative Whigs. When even the Duke of Wellington, great hero of the Napoleonic Wars, couldn’t hold together a government, the reformist Whigs finally got a chance to implement their agenda. In particular, the long overdue reform of the House of Commons, to finally break the gentry oligarchy.

Under the leadership of Earl Grey, political heir to Charles James Fox, the reformist Whigs came to power in 1830 and achieved a popular mandate for their agenda in the 1831 election. Nonetheless, reform stalled in the conservative House of Lords. Over a few dramatic months of political brinksmanship it looked like reform might fall at the last hurdle. Grey threatened to resign unless the king flooded the Lords, creating enough pro-reform lords (through either new peerages or writs of acceleration) to pass the package. When William IV refused, Grey made good his threat — the last time a government fell due to royal intervention — but, after Wellington confirmed that Grey was too popular in the Commons for the Tories to form a government, Grey had to be recalled. To avoid flooding, Wellington agreed that his supporters would abstain in the Lords, allowing the reforms to pass. Though some, the ultra-Tories, defiantly refused to do so, enough followed Wellington’s lead that the package finally made it through the Lords.

The Great Reform Act

The Great Reform Act of 1832 sought to address the issue both of constituencies and the franchise. On the constituency front, it abolished the rotten boroughs and other too-small constituencies, split up the larger constituencies, and created new ones for the more recently emerged urban areas. It furthermore extended the franchise to include, in the counties, not just those who owned land worth at least two pounds, but also those who rented land worth higher values. Under the new system, some tenant farmers could vote for the first time. Similarly, the borough franchise was simplified, taking away all the idiosyncratic systems for a single requirement to rent or own property worth at least ten pounds, with those who could have previously voted but couldn’t meet the new requirements being grandfathered in.

Overall, the reform act led to a small increase in the franchise while creating fairer, more uniform constituencies. It was by no means the end of the road to reform, but it was the first and most important step, breaking the gentry oligarchy of the previous era and creating more competitive and democratic elections across the country, even if the vast majority still couldn’t vote.

It also ended the Whig and Tory factions as they had previously existed. In opposition to the reformist agenda of Grey and his allies, the more conservative Whigs finally split permanently from the rest of their faction and fused with the Tories to create the Conservative Party in 1834. Like before, the Tory brand had become toxic: just as the post-1688 Tories were stained by Jacobitism and opposition to Parliamentary sovereignty, the post-1832 Tories were stained by their opposition to reform. Nonetheless, the Tory label was applied to the new party and, though still disparaging when in the mouths of opponents, was soon used by supporters as well.

Renewed under the influential leadership of Robert Peel, the Conservative Party would accept reform and attempt to embrace the opportunity that more democratic elections offered to beat their opponents at the ballot box. They would present themselves, not as reactionaries, but as sensible managers of this new political reality, as declared by Peel’s ‘Tamworth Manifesto’.

Yet, to go a little beyond our period, Peel would soon become disillusioned with the party he had founded. He was strongly in favour of free trade, while most Conservatives were avowed protectionists. In 1846, his faction — creatively called the Peelites — split from the Conservative party and began a loose alliance with the remaining Whigs, who had come under the leadership of best-frenemies Lord John Russel and Lord Palmerston. Whigs and Peelites governed in coalition with each other on-and-off before uniting to oust a Conservative government in 1859 and finally permanently fusing into the Liberal Party. It was these parties that would form Britain’s two largest political forces all the way up to the First World War, after which splits within the Liberals would allow them to be replaced by the Labour Party as the other half of the two-party system.

Dignified and Effective

We’ve seen how, over the course of this period, various posts and institutions lost their power and joined the ‘dignified’ side of government. Most of the great officers, of course, but more importantly the monarch themselves, who went from ruling, to influencing, to a mere figurehead position. The passing of the Great Reform Act also proved something else: that a prime minister with the full support of the Commons could force the king into remaining merely dignified and, from there, could use royal powers to cow the House of Lords under threat of flooding. The House of Lords too, then, was rendered largely dignified. (Though it would continue to be an obstacle to reform, on and off, until first Lloyd George and then Attlee broke its remaining power through their respective Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949.)

With the old now dignified, the prime minister and newly more democratic House of Commons would enter the next era, soon to be the Victorian period, as the engines of the effective government and basis of a system of mass democracy. In post-1832 Britain, parties formalised to fight competitive elections, replacing the old factional powerbrokers and local election-controlling magnates. Power would be given to whoever could win those competitive elections, rather than whoever could use graft and patronage to hold together enough of those powerbrokers and magnates. And this change was felt, not just in elections, but on the ground too. In 1838, the People’s Charter was drafted out of a feeling of betrayal by this incremental reform, demanding universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, and a host of other radical reforms. The Chartists were Britain’s first truly mass working-class movement, setting the stage for later mass protest campaigns like the women’s suffrage movement.

Truly the end of a political era and beginning of the next: one in which dignified and effective were firmly separated forevermore and politics moved out of the drawing room and into the streets.

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Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this, feel more than welcome to subscribe for more like it as well as my original fiction. Though very long, this article is fundamentally an overview and jumping off point: I encourage you to read further about anything I touched on that interested you. And, if you were confused by all these aristocrats and their complicated titles, you might want to check back on this article, which sought to explain all that:

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In two weeks, my next short fiction will be Honour’s Forge, the story of an aging master-fencer and a young protégée angry at the world for not giving him his due, and of the duel between them that none shall soon forget. It’s inspired by two episodes from the life of Alex Dumas (the general, not his son the writer, nor his grandson the other writer), famous as the highest ranked black man ever in the French Army, who served alongside Napoleon.

And two weeks after that, I’ll be using that story as an excuse to discuss duelling and the culture of honour in the early modern period. It’s a topic so often misrepresented in media, so I’ll be doing my bit to correct that.

Don’t know where to continue with my writing? This might help:

It would be a long evening if he merely stood in the corner. Longingly, Narciso’s gaze swept over the string quartet at the other end of the dancefloor. Would that he were amongst them, viola in hand.

Still, dancing was a kind of music. He enjoyed it, genuinely. It was the need for a partner that filled him with dread, so soon after his humiliation. Not that any here knew of either him or his story. So there was nothing to fear. No laughs behind discrete hands as eyes followed him around the room. No, nothing to fear, Narciso reminded himself.

The music swelled and his heart with it. Yes, to dance really would be a pleasure. Yet, all the young misses made such a habit of congregating together, turning a dozen judging eyes on any hapless man who might deign to approach. Would it be better, he wondered, to tell them that he wished for no romance – that nothing was further from his mind after his humiliation – but only the pleasure of the body in movement, subsumed by rhythm and melody?

His eyes caught and held – against his own better judgement – on a rare solitary figure. She sat by the dancefloor, watching the music. Hair of burnished copper, reflecting the candles into a warm halo glow. Her face, he saw in profile: cotton soft, freckled, something feline in the features. A kindred spirit, surely. One who, like he, yearned to feel the music. He picked his way towards her.

‘Miss?’ he said, upon arrival.

She started. ‘Sir?’

‘Master Narciso Cilma, madam, if you shall excuse me for introducing myself. I wished to ask for the pleasure of a dance.’ The words hung between them. ‘With you,’ he clarified after a moment.

‘Well, it would be rude to refuse,’ she replied, making no effort to rise from her seat and leaving him hanging awkwardly over her.

‘Quite.’ Another moment. ‘Do you? Refuse, that is? I apologise for any impertinence.’

Her eyes met his. The shared expression was something like bafflement on both accounts.

‘No, I… of course not. I’m not much of a dancer, however.’

‘Prefer to listen? Or do you play yourself?’

‘Music, you mean?’ She stood to take the proffered hand and gave an encouraging smile – to him or to herself, he wasn’t entirely sure. ‘No, I’ve never much cared for it. A menace on the pianoforte: my father banned me from learning further, as I was in danger of driving the whole family mad.’

‘Then he deprived you of a great gift,’ said Narciso. ‘There is nothing that touches the spirit quite like it.’

She smirked at that. Almost snorted, perhaps, but caught herself.

‘I thought, perhaps, you were sitting to listen to the quartet,’ he continued. ‘It’s clear I misunderstood.’

At that, she shrugged and consented to being led to the dancefloor nonetheless.

‘You have me at a disadvantage, now, I fear,’ he said as they took their places, ready for the music to begin anew.

‘How so?’

‘You have yet to furnish me with your name.’

She blushed. ‘An oversight for which I must apologise, then, good sir.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Miss Valeria Malfaraez.’

‘A pleasure, miss.’

It was miss, then. Not that it mattered, of course. The idea of courting anyone at all made Narciso shiver and, besides, he feared he had thus far given rather a poor accounting of himself.

A lively country tune began and, with it, the jig itself. And then there was nothing but the music and the movement and the glance at her charming features and – he was pleased to see – the smile that slowly spread across them as they spun and hopped and exchanged partners and found one another again. Narciso lost himself and found himself and the world was nothing but the dancefloor and the quartet and the girl.

After too short an eternity, the world ended in a small apocalypse consisting entirely of the music coming to an end, and Narciso awoke back into the cold and quiet realm beyond the music. The southerners at the very extremity of the continent believed that all of existence was a song held by the goddess Purtharva and that people had been crafted to continue that song, with voices for singing and hands for playing, and that one day the song would end and existence with it. A wise group of heathens, Narciso thought them.

‘Thank you,’ he said to Miss Malfaraez. ‘I shall leave you to your solitude, intruding no longer.’

‘No, wait,’ she said. He squinted in honest confusion and saw – for the second time – something of the same expression in her too.

‘Miss?’

‘I would prefer the company, sir, if it pleases you.’

‘Nothing would please me more.’

They took a turn around the room, arm in arm, on the vaguely stated goal of finding something to drink.

‘Music, sir. You seem to enjoy it.’

‘Of course!’ Narciso replied. ‘How could anyone not?’

‘Well it’s just noise, is it not?’

‘Miss Malfaraez, I am shocked at you. No, it is not mere noise.’

‘Do you play?’

‘I do,’ he said proudly. ‘Violin and pianoforte and – my great love – guitar.’

‘Guitar? Is that not a rather provincial little instrument?’

‘It has that reputation, yes. Unfairly. But you should hear it in the hands of a master.’

‘Are you a master?’

‘Endeavour to be,’ said Narcisco, defensively. ‘I write, too,’ he added.

‘Music?’

‘What else?’

‘Poetry, perhaps,’ she replied. ‘Now there’s romance.’

‘Nonsense. Words cannot capture the soul. Only music can do that.’

‘I hope you never have the displeasure of reading mine, then.’

‘You’re a poet?’

It was her turn to look defensive. ‘Endeavour to be.’

He laughed at that and she joined him.

‘I’d like to read it,’ he said.

‘You’d have to play for me first.’

‘I’d like that too.’

They found wine and lemonade and opted for the stronger of the two. They sipped, looking at each other over the rims of their glasses, and Narcisco’s head emptied of anything to say. Fearing that she would hate the silence, he grasped at something.

‘I thought, miss, that you might be Fenyloddi. Yet your name is as Savarian as my own.’

‘Because of the hair?’ She shook it and he shivered in sweet pleasure. ‘No, but we hail from that direction. Some place you’d have never heard of in eastern Toseldo.’

‘Yet here you are in Cartanda. For the whole social season?’

‘Only a week or two, almost at an end now already.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it. I’ll see you again, though? At the Duke of Roleros’ ball the day after next, perhaps?’

‘Alas,’ she said, glancing down, ‘I’m not possessed of an invite.’

‘Oh. At the theatre, then? Tomorrow? Let me take you. They’re putting on a Theman comedy in the Count’s Theatre. Islander style: all music and singing.’

‘I… sir, I’m not sure if that would be possible.’

‘Whyever not?’

‘It might be inappropriate.’

He blushed. He’d gone too far. What was he doing? Trying to court her? He began to stammer out an apology, until she cut him off.

‘In truth, Master Cilma, I must tell you that I am currently engaged to be married.’

His heart dropped. ‘I’m sorry. I should have—’

‘Nonsense. You could not have known. I was not sure when to mention it – it felt presumptuous to do so – but now I fear I have in some way deceived you.’

‘The nonsense is all yours, ma’am. Any fault is mine.’

They resumed walking. How could such a thing make him feel so wretched, when a few minutes earlier he had been so set on never courting again? It reminded him of his humiliation. Forever, he would make a fool of himself in matters of romance.

‘I was engaged, a few months ago,’ Narciso admitted. He cringed. What had possessed him to admit such a thing?

‘You’re not married, are you?’ Miss Malfaraez asked, heat in her voice. ‘Because I wouldn’t take kindly to—’

‘No. No, you misunderstand. I say I was engaged, but really it doesn’t deserve the name. I thought I loved her. I asked, she said yes. All was bliss.’

‘Sounds like an engagement to me.’

He locked his melancholy eyes with her bright ones.

‘It wasn’t,’ he said. ‘She had a secret understanding with another man. Only said yes to me so no-one would suspect, and to – through jealousy – force her beau to admit their attachment to the world. It worked for her. She begged off and they married. So, you see, it was a sham. Not a real engagement.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, stopping and squeezing his hand. Then she cracked a smile. ‘Nonetheless, you were definitely engaged.’

‘Was not!’

‘You asked, she said yes, there really isn’t much more to it than that.’

‘There is! Intent, perhaps. Or love – complete and mutual love.’

‘Eynas Reito above, if that’s required then no-one would ever be engaged.’

‘Yourself included, miss?’

He feared he’d gone too far. Yet, she narrowed her eyes playfully at him.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I believe in it.’

‘Love?’

‘Indeed. Sincere attachment exists, of course. To family and friends and – I’m assured – spouses. We could label that love. But a transcendent connection with a single other soul? To entirely lose yourself in another person? Exist as merely an extension of them? I don’t know, I suspect my favourite poets – Brenna and Tamerot and the like – made the whole thing up merely for how good it sounds in verse.’

‘Maybe they did, if all poets are as cynical as you. Musicians can never be cynics. They can’t hide their truths behind sickly-sweet lies.’

‘And so you believe in it?’ she asked. ‘Love, that is.’

‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘I’d like to, at least.’

‘He’s a local boy, my betrothed. There aren’t many eligible bachelors in the area of the right age and means and, well, he’s one of them. Both families expected it. I didn’t see a reason to say no.’

‘Did you consider that you might find a reason?’

She paused. ‘I didn’t,’ she admitted softly. A beat, and the seriousness left her. ‘Anyway, yours was at least half an engagement.’

‘There’s no such thing,’ he laughed.

‘And yet you’ve had one. An engagement-and-a-half, between the two of us. Average that out and neither of us was ever fully engaged at all.’

‘I fear it doesn’t quite work like that, as much as I might wish it.’

‘Might you?’

‘I might.’

Her smile was the sun. Its rays attacked the morning fog that shrouded his heart with an all-encompassing warmth. Dispersed that fog, forced it into retreat, and left only its glorious, shining self.

They danced as many times as propriety allowed – and then once more, and once more again – and talked of whatever came to their wild young minds. In later years, when he surveyed the landscape of his life, that night stood as a mountain reaching into the clouds, surrounded by naught but flatlands. As the ball drew to a close, of course, they parted, in body if not in soul.

***

Winter thawed and spring sprung and summer burned and autumn fell and, in Cartanda, capital of the Savarian Crown, the social season followed all the rest. For Miss Valeria Malfaraez, it had been a year tortuously slow. Finally, she had returned to the capital on a fool’s quest, yet what were lovers if not – first and foremost – fools? Happy, willing, wonderful fools.

The problem, of course, was that it would be ridiculous to send a note to a man she had met once, a year ago. She had to meet him again, it seemed to her, by happenstance. If Master Cilma was in Cartanda – and he’d better be! – he would be at one of the four high society events of the evening. If she couldn’t happen upon him at the first, then perhaps the second, and so on until a chance meeting was an assured one.

Entering the first had been easy – she’d had an invitation to that one. No luck, however. At the second, she’d had the fortune to come across a rare family acquaintances, who had ushered her inside. Nonetheless, no Cilma. The third, she had entered only by the expedient of barefaced lies directed at two footmen. She didn’t want to consider what she would have to do to breach the fourth.

She had gone through all the rooms. No sign of him. Another failure. Cursing to herself, she prepared to leave. At the other end of the hall, half a dozen stringed instruments sang a tune she knew he would appreciate more than she ever could. They are very good, was all she could come up with.

‘They are very good, don’t you think?’ he said, breath caressing her neck. No need for clarification. In that moment, there was only one he in all the world.

‘That cannot be the best you can manage,’ she retorted, turning. His face was bright and she could do nothing but reflect it back at him.

‘Poets,’ he said in mock distain. ‘Always thinking the more complicated the words, the more powerful the emotion. Truth, power, are the domain of simplicity.’

‘You really don’t read much poetry, do you?’

‘No,’ he admitted, cracking a crooked smile that completed his pretty face. Dashing face – men hated when you called them pretty. As quick as it came, the smile vanished and his eyes grew dark.

‘Apologies,’ he continued, ‘I fear I no longer know how to address you, ma’am. Madam…?’

‘Miss,’ Valeria said, her turn to grin madly. ‘Still Miss Malfaraez, Master Cilma.’

‘You are not… You remain unwed?’

‘That is traditionally what the title denotes,’ she teased, reaching for his arm and leading him in an aimless wander. ‘I admitted to the boy that I had my misgivings and, well, so did he. Preferred a Sophostraton, in fact: a Fenyloddi boy. Respectable family and there’s talk of them entering the army together. None of which is the important thing because the important thing is that we broke it all off and I am entirely free. To court, to love, to marry, any man I wish.’

She looked up as a storm of emotions played out across his face – too many and too confused to separate into their constituent parts. It struck Valeria how very forward she was being.

‘Not, of course, that I came here in any expectation—’

‘I’m betrothed,’ he said, his voice flint: brittle, cold, jagged.

‘Oh. I see.’ She had no right to the jealousy bubbling in her stomach, but asked the question anyway: ‘Who is she?’

‘Someone I met a few months ago. Miss Malfaraez, I though you were already married! Why did you not write me?’

‘Compose that letter for me, please,’ she replied sardonically. ‘And perhaps you’ll see what a ridiculous idea it is. We met once! A year ago! I had no reason to think that you—’

‘You had every reason!’

‘Evidently not, given you found someone else. I had thought – given the nature of your thoughts on the matter – that you would wait for true strength of feeling before proposal. Either you have found that, in which case you have my congratulations, or you have not, in which case I am sorry to see you a cynic. Either way, our night a year ago clearly made less of an impression than you now appear to suggest.’

‘Miss Malfaraez, that night is exactly what led to my current… situation. Knowing that I would never find another, I decided to at least do some good with my family’s moderate fortune. She’s a desperate girl, you see. Little means, no other suitors. I thought I could at least make another creature happy – or comfortable, at any rate – to make up for how wretched I was prepared to live, separated from the only woman I had ever felt such a strong and immediate affection for.’

‘Oh,’ was the only possible response. ‘I see,’ the useless addendum.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘No, I understand. It would be awful of you to abandon that poor girl.’

‘In honour, I could not.’ His gaze held hers. Valeria’s breath caught, her spine tingled, her heart thundered. ‘I could dance, however. Honour could stretch that far.’

Valeria accepted his hand and he led her to the floor and they danced and they danced and they danced.

***

Winter thawed and spring sprung and— no. Who has the time for all that? He wasn’t going to repeat their last mistake.

Eastern Toseldo, she had called it. It had been no lie, except by understatement: more eastern than mere east. It fit, Narciso decided, that she would be amongst the first of their venerable nation to see the sunrise each morn. None were more deserving of its blessing.

He had failed to hire a carriage, so settled for a horse. Arriving, he dismounted and a footman came to take the reins. A grand house – the largest in the area, he had been told at his coaching inn the previous night – but an old one, showing signs of hard weathering and the need for repairs.

Entering, he was met by the unmistakable air of a country ball. The fashions were those of the previous social season, and the perfumes too, the wines of lesser vintage, the music played less expertly. For all that, Narciso found that such events had a conviviality that the grand fetes of Cartanda lacked.

He moved dreamlike into the main hall, still not entirely believing that he was mere moments from eternal bliss. And there, just as in all those dreams soon to be realised, was she. As though Fate itself had tapped her shoulder, she turned and her eyes found him immediately.

Gazes locked, they prowled the edges of the hall, wading through the throng. They came together and Narcisco took Miss Malfaraez’s graceful hand.

‘Why—’ she began.

‘I’m free, Miss Malfaraez. Free thanks to love; free to pursue love.’

‘Your betrothed?’

‘Love, as I said. A young farmer, nothing to his name but his tenancy, except that she loved him and he loved her: a wealth few ever know, even great princes. That wealth, she chose over the cold silver I could provide. This she told me, and I wished her joy, blessed her, and made the pair a handsome gift. Little did she know she gave a chance of happiness not merely to herself but to us, too. I left without delay, here to proffer you my hand, now and forevermore, through blessed matrimony.’

Her head dropped. ‘Not again.’

‘Miss Malfarez?’

‘Cannot you guess?’

‘You’re not. You can’t be.’

‘I had no choice!’

‘It has been but a few months since last we spoke! I thought you might wait a little longer—’

‘Quiter,’ she said, leading him away from questing eyes, into a secluded side room where but a few others held private conferences. ‘It was my father, not me. I all but promised him that, having repudiated the only decent match around, I would return from Cartanda with a proposal. And then I didn’t.’

‘So your father found you a match.’

‘He did. A friend of his. A childless widower who, from affection for my family, was willing to overlook my “wilful ways”.’

‘And you agreed.’

‘What else was I to do?’

Narciso’s tortured heart threatened to tear. ‘Three engagements between us, and none of them to the right people.’

‘Three-and-a-half, as I recall,’ she said with a smirk.

‘It’s no laughing matter,’ he replied, laughing nonetheless.

‘I am sorry. To beg off again… my betrothed would take it unkindly. My family too. I’ve never wanted scandal attached to my name.’

‘I understand. I esteem you too highly to ask such a thing.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Regardless, it’ll happen.’

‘Excuse me?’ A confused chuckle escaped her red lips.

‘I’ve decided. Some entity – I suspect one of the Islanders’ gods; it’s the kind of thing they would do – has both the desire to see us together and a rather tedious sense of humour. So, you see, you shan’t marry him. The how and the why matters not. You shan’t marry him.’

‘I fear you have left the world of the rational, Master Cilma.’

‘Join me in this other world, Miss Malfaraez. It’s nicer here.’

‘I cannot. That world sounds comforting. But it is a fantasy.’

‘It is time to break this cycle. An oath: I shall propose to none other than you, for as long as I may live. I shall love none other and shall marry none other.’

‘Don’t swear to that which you cannot uphold.’

‘I do not.’

‘Life is a long time. Soon, I shall be gone from yours.’

‘I take back not a word.’

She said nothing, but merely shook her head. He remained taciturn.

‘Now, how about a dance?’ he asked.

‘He’s here. The man I am promised to. I don’t think… it would create trouble for me.’

‘No, of course, I understand,’ he said, crestfallen. ‘Next time, we shall dance.’

‘I would like that,’ she replied.

***

Summer and winter, social and unsocial, and all the other seasons, around and around and around. In the course of their passing, a Miss Malfaraez emerged Mistress Lasado. And the house of Mistress and Master Lasado was blessed first by the twins and then their little brother. And it was a happy house, at times. And a melancholy one, at others.

And from the house Lasado, they heard of a composer newly come to popular attention. He had written for a play, where he found his fame, and then increased it when the royal company played his symphonies. He remained a bachelor, it was told, though Queen Apoleana herself had taken an interest in finding him a match.

To celebrate a decade of their union, Valeria persuaded her husband into a rare visit to the capital. He complained of the long journey and his painful joints, but she knew his two greatest joys were airing his minor ills and indulging her. He had come to love her, she believed, and Valeria had long felt guilty that she could not return that devotion.

Their first night, he took her to a concert. It was that composer. The one she liked; the one whose pieces she was always playing so prettily on the pianoforte. They sat in the stalls and the music was beautiful but not so beautiful as the man who had written it. He stood at the front, face away, violin in hand, and occasionally Valeria caught a glimpse of his profile beneath shaggy dark hair and every glance felt an infidelity to the good and kind man who had fathered her three children and lightly held her trembling hand.

After the last notes died, and then the applause that followed it, her husband spoke into her ear. ‘There are a few routs tonight, I’m told.’

‘You’re not too tired?’

‘Too old, you mean,’ he said with a smile.

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘And I thank you for it, but now I shall have to prove you wrong.’

And so he did, though the rout-party was uncomfortably crowded – which was, after all, the whole stupid point of the thing. They wagered money on Tarot and on Seven or Sacedante and on another game, new to them and which they never caught the name of, but which appeared to consist mostly of them handing over their savars and other monies under the authority of increasingly impenetrable rules. Leaving the gambling tables, they drank and conversed and listened to a guitar playing in some other room.

‘A guitar is an odd choice for company so high in pedigree,’ said Valeria’s husband.

‘I knew a man once,’ she replied, ‘who claimed that reputation unfair. I think it sounds lovely. A truly Savarian instrument, but why should that count against it?’

They wandered in its direction, out one room and down a corridor and into another, conversing lightly, until Valeria stopped and beheld him, all of him, almost close enough to touch.

‘I say, it’s the composer!’ said Master Lasado. ‘If only we had someone to introduce us.’

But already he had found her – not the he who lived in her house, but the he who lived in her heart. His eyes glinted and his soft lips turned and, finishing his music, he walked up to them and bowed.

‘In truth,’ said Valeria, flittering between the two men, ‘Master Cilma and I made acquaintance many years ago – before our marriage, even – though we have not seen one another since.’

‘So long ago,’ said Cilma, ‘that I know not even by what name I should call either one of you, sir, madam.’

‘Lasado,’ said her husband. ‘Lasado, these ten years.’

‘So long indeed?’ said Master Cilma. ‘You have my congratulations.’

‘And children,’ Valeria said. ‘Three of them, we have.’

‘Children, truly?’ His face was mask. His fidgeting fingers, long and strong and sure, he thrust into the pockets of his rich scarlet coat. ‘Though that is only to be expected,’ he continued in a lower voice.

‘My wife is an admirer of yours.’

‘Of your music,’ she clarified.

‘She’s always playing it.’

Cilma chuckled, dimpling his cheeks. ‘When I knew her, Miss Malf— Mistress Lasado claimed to have neither ear nor talent for the musical arts.’

‘I practiced.’ She blushed.

‘And quite some practice it took, I tell you, Master Cilma.’ Her husband flashed her that youthful smile that stole decades from his face, and then it was gone and hard lines creased his forehead and his brows were bunched. ‘For a year, I wanted to take an axe to that pianoforte. But she kept at it, proving once and for all that tenacity trumps talent ten times in ten.’

‘And your poetry? Did you keep at that, too?’

‘Poetry?’ asked Master Lasado. ‘This is the first I’m hearing of it.’

‘Some pursuits, I had to put aside for the duties of wife and mother and mistress of a house,’ said Valeria, caught between embarrassment and defiance. Did he think he still knew her, a decade since the end of their silly fantasies?

‘Still, I would’ve liked to have read it. Or heard it: they say poetry should always be read aloud, making it a kind of music,’ said Cilma.

‘Do you enjoy poetry?’

‘Master Cilma never had any time for it,’ Valeria said.

‘These days I do. Like I said, there is a musicality to it that I never appreciated before. Brenna and Tamerot are particular favourites.’

Valeria’s breath caught in her throat.

‘We were at your concert this evening,’ said her husband. ‘I admit, I should count myself also amongst your admirers. Your second symphony, I particularly enjoy. Tell me, is it true what I’ve heard? About the dedication, I mean?’

‘What have you heard?’

‘That the queen-consort herself wished to be its beneficiary, but you refused.’

‘It is quite true. Though it upset Her Most Faithful Eminence, I had already penned a dedication. I would not change it.’

‘To whom?’

‘“A worthy woman of character and beauty”.’

‘And for that, you refused the queen? My dear man, you didn’t even name the woman!’

‘In honour, I couldn’t.’

‘Your mistress, is she?’

‘No, sir. Never that.’

Valeria put her hand against her husband’s back.

‘Might we retire?’ she asked. ‘I fear that, once again, your vigour has overawed my own.’

‘Of course. Tally a moment with Master Cilma while I find us a coach.’

He left them alone and Valeria knew not what to say as nervous sweat ran down the inside of her arms and her breathing deepened.

‘I’ve been waiting ten years for that dance,’ Master Cilma said, finally. ‘I suppose I can wait a little longer. Die waiting, if I must.’

With those words alone, he bowed to her and, distrusting herself to do anything else, she turned and hasted to her husband.

***

Snow and shine, the world went on and Narciso with it, though some part of him remained trapped in a moment already so many years gone. He travelled to Prolais, to play his music, and Xhodesi besides. A Xhodesii violinist had confessed, over wine, to finding Narciso’s compositions lacking.

‘There’s a yearning to them,’ he had said. ‘Yet always they seem to stop at the precipice. Your climaxes, when they come, fail to convince.’

Narciso had agreed, and reflected, and confessed that – when it came to those parts of a composition – he could merely emulate. The conversation had stayed with him as he travelled back to Cartanda.

Upon his return to the capital, Queen Apoleana – queen-regent now, on behalf of the toddling king – declared a ball in his honour, to follow the first performance of his seventh symphony. In a moment of madness, he wrote an invitation in his own hand, addressed to Master and Mistress Lasado, then teetered for hours between handing it to the footman or the fire. Into the footman’s hand it went, and then there was nothing more he could do.

The concert was a success – though Narciso himself could not but agree with the Xhodesii violinist – and then to the ball, where he drank and chatted and counted down the minutes. Putting aside his glass, he glanced at his watch again, then around the room, and then— and then there she was.

Two images warred in his eyes. One, as he had first seen her. Vibrant copper locks pulled back from a soft, girlish face. Bright, curious eyes daring the world to defy her. The other, as she had become. More certain, more proud, more visceral. Harder in her features, and yet those lines couldn’t all be the work of the modiste. He forced his eyes to settle back on hers and the two images resolved into one. He approached.

‘Mistress Lasado,’ he said, ‘thank you for accepting my invitation. Might your husband be around?’

Mist crossed her face and she failed to meet his gaze. Moments ticked by.

‘You find me a widow,’ she said coldly.

Narciso’s heart rose and he cursed himself as a beast for it.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I might not have loved him, but I still grieve him.’

‘I’m sure you do.’ And, after another moment, ‘Why did you come?’

‘You invited me.’

‘I did. You didn’t have to—’

‘You thought we were inevitable. Do you still?’

‘I do.’

‘You’ve waited for me?’

‘Evidently.’

‘Chaste?’

‘Not entirely,’ he smirked.

‘It’s not a game.’ At her words, Narciso’s smile faded. ‘You think it’s just about you and about me. That all these years were some distraction from our true happiness. My husband. My children. My life. It wasn’t. It was real. Not perfect, but what is? It was real. It was mine.’

‘I know,’ he said, humbled. ‘Or, no. No, I don’t. But I believe you.’

A tear escaped her. ‘You wish to propose?’

‘You know I do. But not like this.’

‘Like what, then?’

‘I don’t know. But not like this.’

She said nothing.

‘Ma’am, might I ask something else? Might I ask for a dance?’

She swallowed and looked at him and the look filled him with excitement and with fear and with guilt for his own feelings. And she nodded and took his hand and he led her to the dancefloor and, for the first time in too many years, they danced. For the moment, it was enough.

**

Just one more slow groaning of the seasons. Surely this frivolity is almost up, they seemed to say. Soon, soon, came a far-off answer. Tread careful. Don’t rush.

‘Come here, Juan,’ Valeria called. Her two girls, she had wrapped in each of her arms. ‘You can knock on the door, if you like.’

Her youngest mounted the steps and, on tiptoes, struck the knocker. A footman answered.

‘Mistress Lasado and her spawn,’ she said. ‘No, he’s not expecting us. But you’ll want to tell him anyway.’

Nonetheless, the footmen didn’t invite them inside, but merely pushed the door to as he went to find his master. Slow steps going upwards, then running back down. The door reopened.

‘Master Cilma begs you let me escort you to the receiving room.’

They did indeed let him. Valeria tried to settle her children on the sofa, rub at some dirt that had somehow appeared on Juan’s nose, and stop Cristina and little Val from wandering away in search of more immediate amusements. It was pointless, of course, and the three of them were off in three separate corners when the door finally opened and closed.

‘Children, come. You’re guests,’ she said. She was facing away. She wasn’t sure she could ever turn to face him.

‘Well, hello there. And who might you all be?’ The voice forced her hand to her chest.

‘Miss Lasado, sir. And this is my sister, Miss Cristina.’

‘No, I’m Miss Lasado, sir. This is Miss Valeria.’

‘No, I’m older. I’m taller, so I have to be.’

‘No I’m taller!’

‘Stand back-to-back,’ he said and she could hear the smile. ‘I don’t know, it looks like you’re precisely of a height to me. Perhaps you can both be Miss Lasado.’

‘But then how do we tell each other apart?’

‘I don’t know, how do you? My word are you two alike.’

‘I’m Master Juan! Master Lasado, I mean, since papa is… Who are you, sir?’

‘Master Cilma, Master Lasado. I know your mama, since long before you were born.’

Finally, she forced herself to face him. Ridiculous though it seemed, she had never seen him without a coat before. His shirtsleeves were folded back, revealing lithe forearms. Forearms that could wrap her and hold her and love her. She had to stop herself from reaching out to clutch them.

‘Hello, Miss Malfaraez. Mistress Lasado, I mean.’

‘Valeria,’ she said.

‘Valeria,’ he confirmed.

‘You wouldn’t just be taking me, you understand? You’d be taking them too. Loving them. A father.’

‘I could do that. I would like to.’

She called her children back to her and, finally, they came. She held them and his gaze both.

‘Go on then. Properly,’ she said.

He grinned and fell to one knee and took her hand. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is everything that came after.

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Thank you for reading. This one ended up a little delayed, only because it got quite out of hand. If you enjoyed it and would like more, feel more than welcome to subscribe. In two weeks, on 22nd January, I’ll be posting my next non-fiction, a long-form discussion of how Britain was governed in the early modern period. (More specifically, from 1660-1832, or from Restoration to Reform.)

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Two weeks after that, you can probably expect a return to naval fiction and my ‘Gulf Sea War’ stories. Fortune’s Favour, is a cat-and-mouse chase on the high seas, full of grit and deception. Otherwise, if it’s ready first, I might post Honour’s Forge, about a duel and inspired by the life of General Alex Dumas, the black nobleman’s son who rose to high command during the French Revolution. Either way, see you then.

And if you want to keep reading, this might help:

I’m fascinated by ‘revolution’, and in particular by the first French Revolution, the one that gets to be called the French Revolution, generally dated to have begun in 1789.

What is revolution? Literally, it is a turning. It is a period outside of ‘normal’ politics; of rapid political and social change. A period in which we abandon how things are done in favour of how they could be.

Revolutions are, of course, dangerous. Stable societies are stable for a reason: whatever that is, they work. Maybe not justly, or even particularly well, but nonetheless definitionally they stop societal collapse. If they didn’t, they would not be stable.

Outside of revolutionary periods, societies change slowly. They evolve, cautiously grasping their way forwards. Revolution is, on the other hand, a leap into the unknown. One in which the old is brushed aside and a new system built up from nothing. At the end of that leap, the society might land safely, or might fall into a hidden chasm.

‘Path dependency’ is the concept that, once we start doing something a certain way, we will keep doing it that way. Our societies, in effect, suffer from inertia: they keep going as they are, even long after they have become irrational, until a large enough force comes along to change them. Revolution is that force; its change absolute.

The French Revolution was a time of political change, of course. But it was also a time where everything — all of society, all of culture — was subject to the revolutionary principle. How freeing would it have been to live in such a time? A time when all can be questioned, when people were looking for new, better approaches to every aspect of the social system. And how terrifying, when the old order collapsed like sand and a new one was built on the whims of a few people who happened to have taken hold of the reins of revolution for a year, a month, a week, a day.

It was in this climate that the old measurement systems were thrown out in favour of the metric system. The currency system, Carolingian in its origin, was decimalised. These are innovations that didn’t just survive in France, they spread to most of the rest of the world.

The first great climax of the revolutionary spirit came on the night of 4th August 1789. When a nobleman moved to abolish feudal privileges in an evening session of the National Assembly, it set off a flurry of delegates stepping forward to renounce every part of the feudal regime. Titles, tithes, feudal dues, the privileged position of the nobility, all swept aside in a single night. Though parts of the programme were quietly dropped in the post-coital clarity of the following morning, the vast majority were implemented.

Yet, the Revolution didn’t stop there. It couldn’t. Did you know that the French revolutionaries effectively nationalised the Catholic Church? Under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the Church’s lands were brough under public management, all monasteries were closed, priests were turned into salaried employees of the state, and appointment to clerical positions — from parish priest to bishop — were subject to election by their parishioners. Even God could not escape the revolution.

Nor was time itself safe. I’m talking, of course, about the French Republican calendar.

The French Republican Calendar

Often erroneously called the French Revolutionary calendar, the French Republican calendar was introduced in 1793, during Year II of the Republic according to the calendar itself.

The Revolution had been playing with the concept of time since the very beginning. After all, a calendar in which the ‘year one’ was a fairly random date that had previously been incorrectly guessed to have been the year of Jesus’ birth just wasn’t very revolutionary or rational. Instead, revolutionaries began playing around with calling 1789 the Year I of the Age of Liberty. However, this was just a renaming of the years, not a wholesale new calendar.

Yet the Gregorian year itself was offensive to the revolutionary spirit in its irrationality. Seven-day weeks are strange: why pick a prime number, and one that doesn’t divide well into months or years? And the months are a complete disaster: why is February like that? Why are September, October, and November named after the wrong numbers? Why are other months named mostly after Roman gods and rulers?1 Let’s just throw this all away and start again from scratch!

So, after the Republic was declared on 21st September 1792, a committee was formed to create an entirely new calendar for Republican France, which was formally adopted a little over a year later. This is the story of that calendar.

Designing the French Republican Calendar

The main problem with designing a calendar is that calendars attempt to align two things that cannot be aligned: mathematical divisibility and observable natural phenomena.

It makes sense to base your calendar around the natural phenomena all around us. The day-night cycle. The lunar cycle. The seasonal cycle. The movement of the stars. Before formal calendars, this is presumably how humans tracked time. But, if you’re going to do that, you might want to start quantifying. How many days in a lunar cycle? How many lunar cycles in a seasonal cycle? That is, fundamentally, what a calendar is.

And what you swiftly conclude is that none of these things divide neatly into each other. Rounding to a single decimal, there are 29.5 days in a lunar month. 12.4 lunar months in a solar year. Also, the year as defined by the stars and as defined by the seasons is subtly different in length. It’s maddening.

So, compromise must be reached. Solar calendars throw out tracking the months by the lunar cycle and just divide the year into 12 arbitrary lumps of time (assuming they don’t abandon months entirely) — though they still have to decide what a year is, and deal with the fact that 365 doesn’t divide by 12. Lunar calendars define a year as 12 lunar cycles and abandon any connection to consistent seasons or the movement of the stars. Lunisolar calendars are lunar calendars that add a 13th month (a kind of ‘leap month’) to some years (specifically, about seven out of every 19 years) so the seasons don’t get too off kilter, creating years of wildly differing lengths. None of these are perfect solutions but instead different sets of compromises.

The Gregorian calendar is a fairly standard solar calendar, but still suffers from that weirdness that is the seven-day week and the stupidity that is goddamn February2. So, how did the revolutionaries try to fix it?

The Republican year was split into 12 months of 30 equal days. 30 days isn’t too far off the 29.5 days of a lunar cycle (it’s certainly closer than Gregorian months, which are on average too long — most of them having 31 days — hence why stupid February has to be like that) and allows each month to be perfectly divided into three 10-day weeks.

Oh yes, that’s right: three 10-day weeks. (Though they were officially called ‘décades’, not weeks, I’m going to call them weeks because decade means something else in English.) And within each week, the old days based on the names of Roman gods (in French, that is: the English days are instead named for equivalent Germanic deities) were replaced with a simple, if boring, numbered system based on Latin numbers. (Specifically, the names were: primidi, duodi, tridi, quartidi, quintidi, sextidi, septidi, octidi, nonidi, and décadi.)

But hang on, you’re probably thinking, 12 30-day months adds up to 360 days, not 365. So, what did the Republican calendar do with those last five days? Or with leap years? Well, this is where I have to introduce the concept of intercalary days, which the Gregorian calendar doesn’t have. Intercalary days are a feature of certain calendars: days that fall outside of the usual structure, being outside of any week or month. The French Republican calendar put those last five days at the end of the year to form a kind of half-week long festival to the nation and republic. Every four years, a sixth day would be added — the calendar’s leap day.

Because this was to be a republican calendar, Year I began with the declaration of the Republic in 1792 rather than the beginning of the revolution in 1789. (Meaning that they were celebrating the revolution’s more republican-radical turn rather than its more constitutional-reformist beginnings.) Also, the revolutionaries noticed a fun coincidence: that the republic had been declared on 21st September 1792, and the September equinox in 1792 was on 22nd September. So, it was decided that the year would begin with the autumnal equinox as observed by the Paris observatory — meaning that the Republican calendar began the year at a completely different time to the Gregorian calendar. (And that the first day of the new calendar was technically the day after the republic was declared, which to be fair does make it the first full day in which France was a republic.)

So that’s the system. New Year is the autumnal equinox, after which there are 12 months each made up of three 10-day weeks. At the end of the year are five intercalary days, with a sixth added every fourth year. But that’s all quite boring so, next, the system was handed over to a poet.

Naming the Republican Calendar

Fabre d’Églantine was a poet and playwright and is one of those revolutionaries who’s never quite notable enough to have become widely famous. However, if you know your French Revolutionary history, then you know the two things he is known for.

First, he invented the ‘Foreign Plot’ to accuse his enemies (people who knew how corrupt he was) of being anti-revolutionary traitors. When this act of fiction was uncovered, along with d’Églantine’s general corruption, it ended up convincing Robespierre that d’Églantine and all his allies — in particular his great patron Georges Danton and my best boy Camille Desmoulins — were traitors. This led pretty much directly to the trial and execution of the Dantonists in April 1794 which was itself the beginning of the Great Terror — those terrible final months of the Reign of Terror.

But second, it was to him that the task of naming everything in the new calendar was given. Not only did d’Églantine come up with a name for every month, he even named every individual day. (Inspired by and attempting to supplant how the Catholic calendar had a saint for each day of the year.) The day names were mostly basic rural items, like the names of animals and foodstuffs and tools, with the idea being that these basic, simple things should be celebrated and reflected upon on their respective days.

d’Églantine came up with the month names mostly by making French terms sound more Latin or Latin/Greek terms sound more French, creating made-up terms that usually reflected whatever was happening in that particular month. They are, along with what they were supposed to mean, as follows:

1. Vendémiaire (September/October) — grape harvest

2. Brumaire (October/November) — mist

3. Frimaire (November/December) — frost

4. Nivôse (December/January) — snow

5. Pluviôse (January/February) — rain

6. Ventôse (February/March) — wind

7. Germinal (March/April) — germination

8. Floréal (April/May) — flower

9. Prairial (May/June) — meadow

10. Messidor (June/July) — harvest

11. Thermidor (July/August) — heat

12. Fructidor (August/September) — fruit

So, as you can see — and as with the individual day names — the calendar honoured the natural world and agriculture, rather than individuals or deities. They also grouped the months by season: each set of three months having the same ending. (‘ire’ for autumn, ‘ôse’ for winter, ‘al’ for spring, and ‘idor’ for summer.)

The great struggle for anyone interested in the revolution is that, after the calendar was adopted, all the big events got named after the months they took place in under the Republican calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar. Before the Republican calendar, we talk about the 14th July Insurrection (AKA the Storming of the Bastille) or the 10th August Insurrection (AKA the fall of the monarchy). After the calendar, however, history instead uses names like the Thermidorean Reaction (AKA the downfall of Robespierre) and the Coup of 18 Brumaire (AKA Napoleon’s coup).

The other big struggle with the calendar, besides the names of the months, is of course that the year doesn’t align at all with the Gregorian year. Year I of the Republic began on 22nd September 1792, meaning that most of Year I actually took place in 1793. And this is also true of the months themselves, which don’t neatly align with Gregorian months.

But, while these are problems for us today, they weren’t the biggest problems with the calendar at the time. So, what were?

You Had One Job And You Screwed It Up

You might think, what with the new calendar project being all about rationally fixing the old calendar, that they would actually make sure it worked. Except, if you’re eagle-eyed, you might have already spotted something that doesn’t make sense. More specifically, two things I’ve said about the calendar that are not compatible.

First, I mentioned that a sixth intercalary day would be added every four years, like Gregorian leap years. Second, I said that the year began with the autumnal equinox. Here’s the thing: these are two incompatible ways of changing the length of the year.

Now, these are usually compatible and the French Republican calendar had a leap year in Year III, Year VIII, and Year XI — all the standard four years apart without any problem. Though the calendar was abolished in Year XIV, another leap year was planned for Year XV, four years after the last one. However, to keep the first day of the year on the autumnal equinox, the next leap year after that was planned for Year XX, five years after its predecessor.

So, to keep the autumnal equinox as the first day of the year, leap years would occasionally have to fall outside of the standard four year cycle, which was just needlessly confusing.

Furthermore, if the autumnal equinox (as observed over Paris) was really going to be the start of every year then, in order to plan what the calendar would look like in the future, you’ve got to work out when all future autumnal equinoxes will occur. Now, already in the 1790s, we were pretty good at working this stuff out, but by no means perfect. They did, for example, work out when the calendar would start for its first five centuries of use, which is no mean feat. Still, imagine trying to work out exactly what day the year will begin in, say, ten-thousand years. This is the inherent problem with any calendar based around observable phenomena. The Gregorian calendar, on the other hand, for all its faults, is entirely detached from any observable phenomena and so, with a little maths, we can plan out exactly what the calendar will look like for all future years. Billions of years in the future, at the heat death of the universe, we could work out precisely the day, month, and year.

(Proposals to correct this, abandon the autumnal equinox as a new year, and just move to the Gregorian leap year system, were frequently made but never adopted.)

The related problem is how France-centric the calendar was. The calendar begins with the autumnal equinox as observed over Paris because of course the equinox can fall on different days depending on where in the world you are. But that means that everywhere else has to consult Paris to work out when the year starts. Also, do you know what they call the autumnal equinox as observed over Paris in the southern hemisphere? That’s right: the spring equinox, because the seasons are reversed down there.

Which brings up another issue: the months. Those wonderful poetic months that d’Églantine came up with? They all reference what’s going on during that period in France, a temperate country in the northern hemisphere. Imagine telling people in, say, Australia, that they’re supposed to celebrate the month of ‘frost’ in the middle of their summer. And of course only a Frenchman could’ve come up with a calendar where a whole month is named after the grape harvest. Are you really that eager to get your hands on this year’s vintage?

So, though conceived of as a rationalisation of the calendar that would produce something universal to all humanity, the calendar became both confusing to use over the long-run and clearly centred on France itself. Not, shall we say, what was needed for a new universal calendar for the age of liberty and rationality.

A Step Back For… Worker Rights?

That can’t be right, can it? But take a second to think about it. During the 18th century, France allowed workers a single day off per week, on Sunday. The Republican calendar also allowed a single full day off per week, except now the week was 10-days long rather than seven.

Now, to make up for this, the fifth day of the Republican week was designated as a half-day. (The full day off being the tenth and final day of the week.) There were 36 weeks in the Republican calendar (12 months multiplied by three weeks per month), so 36 full days off and 36 half days off, which kinda works out to 54 days off. (36x(36/2)=54.) That’s technically more than the 52-53 Sundays in a Gregorian year. Except, well, half days are stupid. You still have to go into work, you can’t lie in, and your boss probably has some reason why you have to stay late: it’s just nowhere near as good as a full day off. So, as it turned out, most people preferred their 52-53 full days off to 36 full days and 36 half days.

This was also — quite intentionally — a problem for practicing Catholics. After all, the new day off would only align with Gregorian Sunday once in every seven Republican weeks. (So, only about five times per year.) Hence, you were supposed to be at work during mass for the other six out of seven times. This was part of a general effort to de-Christianise the country which frankly deserves its own discussion, but let’s just say that it was a big gripe for those who wanted to maintain Sunday as their day of rest.

Even the Day can be Rationalised

Along with the calendar, a new timekeeping system was introduced. Under this system, a day was 10 hours, an hour 100 minutes, and a minute 100 seconds. There are some advantages to this system, as it massively eases maths using time3, but nonetheless it never really took off.

A few clocks and watches were produced using the new decimal timekeeping system, but it was officially dropped long before the calendar was. If you’ve lived your whole life with one system, and it works well enough, then it’s hard to change it. Even during revolution, sometimes path dependency — social inertia — is too strong a force to overcome.

The End of the French Republican Calendar

After Napoleon came to power in 1799 Year VIII, he slowly began to dismantle many of the more controversial innovations of the earlier revolutionaries. The calendar, however, survived longer than you might otherwise have thought: all the way until, as I mentioned earlier, Year XIV.

The decree abolishing it was promulgated on 22 Fructidor Year XIII, which is 9th September 1805 to the rest of us, but nonetheless the calendar was not immediately taken out of use. Instead, the decree kept the Republican calendar in use until the Gregorian calendar was brought back on 1st January 1806, or 11 Nivose Year XIV. Interestingly, this means that the Republican calendar survived almost two years longer than the republic itself, which was turned into Napoleon’s empire on 18th May 1804, or 28 Floréal Year XII.

Even that wasn’t quite the end of the Republican calendar, as it was briefly brought back for some purposes during the Paris Commune’s uprising in 1871, known under the calendar as Year LXXIX. (Or Year 79: though Roman numerals are the most common way to represent the calendar, and what I’ve used here, actually Arabic numerals were also in use in a less official capacity. If it had caught on, you can imagine that Arabic numerals would have become the standard once the Roman ones became unwieldly.)

And for my fellow fantasy fans, did you know that Tolkien’s Numinorean months have a striking resemblance to the names of the Republican calendar’s months, when translated from Quenya? Wind, flower, heat, fruit, mist, cold: all are translations of both Numinorean months and French Republican months. (The Numinoreans apparently weren’t as obsessed with wine as the French revolutionaries, though, so that equivalent month is called ‘sun fading’ when translated. This proves that Tolkien was much better at naming months than d’Églantine.) The Numinorean calendar also cares about the equinoxes and solstices, so the start and end of the months roughly line up too, though it begins with the winter solstice rather than the autumnal equinox. Coincidence? Well it’s possible that he just came up with similar ‘things happening to a temperate northern hemisphere country during that period’ but also more than possible that he took some inspiration.

What We’ve Learnt

The French Republican calendar was the whole revolution in microcosm. A bold attempt to throw out the old and come up with a whole new system, which turned out to be flawed in a whole host of ways no-one initially realised.

As I said in my introduction, nothing scares me so much as revolution. And yet nothing inspires me like it either. For better or worse — and, by the time the calendar was introduced, mostly worse — the revolutionaries were willing to throw out everything they saw as unjust, backwards, and irrational, and make what they hoped would be a better world. That went for things as large as the position of the monarchy and Church and as seemingly small as how we measure distance and the passage of time.

In our rather politically uninspired period, perhaps we could do with just an iota of that revolutionary spirit of radical renewal. And then, perhaps, we could finally fix goddamn February.

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My post will be the short story Four-And-A-Half Engagements, which I’m pitching as a ‘romantic comedy of manners’. My attempt to channel Austen, basically. Going by my usual schedule, that would go up on New Year’s Day. Instead, I think I’ll put it up on 2nd January.

After that, on 15th January, my next non-fiction article is most likely to be an explainer of early modern British politics and government, to accompany the similar article I wrote last month about the aristocracy of the period.

A knock on his office door. Yazid set aside a report and bid the intrusion enter.

The door swung open and a young man followed it. A junior officer, though Yazid didn’t recognise him. From his uniform, he was one of Yazid’s: one of those elite within an elite that made up the Palatine Guardians. An expectant look got the man speaking.

‘First Captain shar Kepha, sir, I… I need to speak to you.’ The man looked behind him, at the open door, and closed it hastily. ‘It is a matter of the utmost sensitivity.’

Squinting, Yazid bid him sit and asked after his identity.

‘Lieutenant shar Hassan, sir. 2^nd Cohort.’

The lieutenant stared dead ahead, a little past Yazid. Formal to the point of excess. Yazid inspected him. On the table between them, a watch ticked.

‘And?’ said Yazid, finally. ‘The matter?’

‘Sir, I have heard rumours. I took it upon myself to investigate their veracity. Now, I bring you the gravest of news.’

‘Lieutenant, eventually you will have to say it.’

‘Assassination, First Captain. I have uncovered a plot to murder His Sovereign Majesty of the White. To kill Malik Fakhr XII, most beloved of Lord Fariph, himself. A plot, it pains me to admit, sir, involving officers of the Palatine Guardians.’

The boy was close to tears. Yazid let him continue.

‘I have names, sir. And a date. Eleven days from today.’

He dropped a crumpled piece of paper onto the desk. Unfolding it, Yazid found a list of officers. Half a dozen lieutenants and cadets. No-one of higher rank. Stifling a sigh of relief, Yazid rose and embraced Lieutenant shar Hassan.

‘Thank you for your service,’ he said. ‘Leave this now in my hands. Return to your duties and let none know that anything is amiss. It is a great service you have done for your sovereigns.’

shar Hassan nodded and Yazid showed him to the door. For a moment, Yazid’s hand slipped to the knife he wore through his sash. No. He didn’t need a body. Not so soon. The door shut and quietly, to himself, Yazid let out every curse he knew.

***

The same office, two hours hence. Three men huddled around the desk, leaning in.

‘Tonight,’ said Yazid. ‘It must be tonight.’

‘Are you mad?’ asked Grand Captain shar Dawud.

‘It is rather sudden, sir,’ added Staff Captain shar Harun. ‘The date we agreed upon is already in motion. More to the point, we are not yet prepared.’

‘We must be,’ Yazid said. ‘The plan has leaked. I won’t be able to contain it. We go tonight or never.’

‘Have our names…?’ shar Dawud’s face was all worry.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Then perhaps,’ said shar Dawud, ‘it would be better to wait. Arrest some lackeys, remove their heads before they can say anything unfortunate, and prove to His Sovereign Majesty that any threat has been dealt with. Then, at a later date, we could return to… what must be done.’

‘We cannot wait,’ said Yazid.

‘We could, sir,’ shar Harun said. The man had been Yazid’s trusted and loyal aide for years. From shar Dawud, he had expected pushback. Not from shar Harun.

‘And what might His Sovereign Majesty of the White do in the meantime? I ask you, both. Think. Might our Corps even exist if we wait another few months? Might our clans not be impoverished, to the benefit of foreign merchants? Old comrades of mine, we must agree that not only are our actions needed, but they are needed imminently. Delay is unconscionable.’

‘It’s not the necessity I question, First Captain,’ said shar Dawud. ‘None of us take on this task lightly. But if we fail? Do we not just grant further ammunition to those ripping the empire apart? Failure is worse than no action at all.’

‘How can a military man say such a thing? Decisive action, no matter the direction, is always superior to indecision: the experience of a thousand battlefields tells us this.’

Not, of course, that any of them had the experience of that many battlefields. The Palatine Guardians were, unlike the rest of the Guardian Corps, fundamentally a bodyguard and policing force. And a domestic espionage service: that above all else.

‘Sir, we are not on the battlefield,’ interrupted shar Harun.

‘There, you are mistaken. And if the heart of Medanasis is to be carved out and served upon the platter of rationalism, I would rather fall a martyr than live to watch it devoured.’

shar Dawud nodded. Yazid recognised that only the most desperate of circumstances would have ever forced him into the arms of their conspiracy. Yet, shar Dawud’s brother had already been removed from a lucrative sinecure, and his nephew denied rapid promotion within their corps despite old clan connections. And now it seemed His Sovereign Majesty of the White was planning to create new units to take over most of the Guardians’ duties.

In any other circumstances, Grand Captain shar Dawud would have been unflinchingly loyal to the white sovereign. He was like that: a simple man who merely wanted to follow a sovereign he believed in. Yazid had himself been much the same, once. Having been forced into regicide, Yazid knew shar Dawud would rather die now than continue living with such wretchedly split loyalties. Anyway, the man was terrified of discovery. If he was to die a traitor, rather with a sword in hand than an axe against the back of the neck.

‘Very well,’ said the grand captain.

‘Tonight? Truly tonight? With just one more day—’

‘We cannot afford another day,’ said Yazid, cutting shar Harun off. ‘Not even one. Sharpen your knives and harden your hearts. Alert only those men you trust.’

‘Tonight,’ shar Dawud confirmed.

‘Tonight,’ agreed shar Harun, reluctance on his tongue.

‘Tonight.’ Yazid raised his coffee. ‘To His Sovereign Majesty of the Purple, Awn Isa IV. May he wear the white well.’

The toast was made and the conspirators dispersed. Yazid wondered if he would live to see the dawn.

***

‘Where is shar Harun?’ whispered shar Dawud, again. His face looked pale under the light of the full moon.

‘He’ll be here,’ Yazid replied.

The staff captain was only a few minutes late. As were a third of the rest.

‘We cannot just stay here,’ shar Dawud said. ‘We’re too exposed.’

‘We can afford to wait. No patrols are coming. shar Harun made sure of it.’

‘And you are sure we can rely on him?’

‘He will be here.’

They were in a secluded courtyard well past midnight. They had nothing to worry about, Yazid reminded himself yet again. Around him, the men were beginning to look at each other with uncertainty.

A sound. Dozens of hands went to pistol butts and sword hilts. shar Harun came into sight, trailed by a few others. On the arms of their red kaftans – muted in the soft moonlight – they wore a white band. The marker they had chosen to separate friend from foe.

‘Apologies,’ said Staff Captain shar Harun. ‘Some were awake who ought not have been. We had to take the long way.’

‘It matters not,’ replied Yazid. It was not betrayal, then. Silently, Yazid gave his thanks.

There were still men pledged to the plot who had not shown their faces. But they had waited long enough. Those men, Yazid admitted to himself, were not coming. The conspirators said prayers, wished each other luck, and divided to their assignments.

Like all effective plans, theirs was a simple one. shar Dawud was to seize the gates. shar Harun would secure the barracks, keeping all who opposed them safely inside. To Yazid himself fell the final task. Under his knife, the man closest to holy Fariph in all the world would die.

Taking two-score with him – mostly junior officers with clan ties to the senior conspirators, some of whose names had been given to him that morning – Yazid marched towards a servant’s entrance of the Blue Palace: merely one of the palaces and other buildings that made up the walled palace complex, along with the Palatine Guardians’ barracks and various vizirate offices, yet this one the most important for it housed the white sovereign’s own apartments. He tried to affect a relaxed attitude. If they were found, it would be difficult to explain, but not impossible. He was the First Captain of the Palatine Guardians: he reported directly to His Sovereign Majesty of the White. Who else could question him?

They reached the entrance and Yazid peeled off a few to cover the secret exits: the ones known only to the inner imperial family and the most senior officers of their corps. Two others led outside the walls. shar Dawud would send men to guard them. None would be allowed to escape.

The rest of the force entered. The residential wing had been built to confuse; the sovereign’s apartments the centre of a maze that few knew their way through. Of course, they were those few. The white sovereign’s shield, transmuted into the knife against his back.

‘Halt,’ a voice shouted. Young but sure, it carried down the corridor. Yazid found its origin: a few men with weapons drawn blocking the way.

‘Stand down,’ called Yazid. ‘Do you not recognise your commander?’

There should have been no-one here. A few guards only in the residential wing, and most of them already pledged to Yazid’s cause. So who were these? And why?

‘We recognise him.’ The same voice. It belonged to some lieutenant or other.

‘Then stand aside.’

‘Why do you come?’

‘Has it become the custom for commanders to explain themselves?’

‘Tonight it has, yes.’ The swords and pistols were still out, reflecting the dim light of a few oil lamps.

It could mean only one thing. They had been betrayed. Someone knew. Those with misplaced faith in Malik Fakr had rallied against them. A pounding in Yazid’s ears. It was not supposed to have happened like this. It was supposed to be clean. Only one life lost. Supposed to. The cry of the boy-child. Yazid drew his blade, followed by those behind him.

‘Stand aside,’ he repeated.

‘The Guardian Spirits look upon this moment. Have you no shame?’

He couldn’t hate them. Misplaced loyalty was loyalty nonetheless. In a way, he envied them their simple world, where a man need do no more than follow the word of his sovereign wherever it might take him. Alas, Yazid’s was not that simple world.

His soldiers looked to him. They knew: they were committed. If they failed, they were dead. Every moment of delay flirted with the noose. Yazid nodded to them and they advanced.

The fight was short and brutal. In Yazid’s experience, most were. Scimitars rose and fell. Long knives stabbed. A few pistols were discharged into tightly pressed bodies, filling the corridor with white smoke and scarlet blood and surely waking up the entire palace.

Of the men with white bands around their arms, three lay dead. There had been eight men without those bands, heavily outnumbered. No longer. They left the fallen, entrusting their souls to the Winged One, and moved on with haste.

Another group blocked the path. No discussion was needed, this time. Another seven bodies left behind, some still gargling their last words with none to hear. They knew how to kill, those men of the Palatine Guardians.

At the ornate double doors Yazid knew so well, those to the white sovereign’s private apartments, stood another group. The door was always guarded but not, normally, by so many. Amongst them, that lieutenant. The one who had come to Yazid just that morning. shar Hassan, he remembered after a moment. That explained it, then.

‘I hadn’t wanted to believe it,’ said the young lieutenant. He was shaking. His face wet. Somewhere outside the palace, the crack of musketry.

‘You did all this?’ Yazid asked. ‘Rallied all these men?’

shar Hassan nodded. ‘I sensed something in you, this morning. And I noticed things. I had hoped I was wrong. Prepared to die an insubordinate, if I was.’

‘A credit, you are. Awn Isa IV shall need men like you, once he dons the white.’

‘No, sir. He shall remain of the purple, for many years to come. I give my life for it.’

‘Very well.’ Yazid shifted her gaze, looking to a man behind Lieutenant shar Hassan. A man with knife unsheathed. One of those who had been assigned to guard this door tonight. shar Hassan was brave, for sure, but stupid not to have realised that those men would be in on the plot.

The soldier nodded back and took a step and plunged his knife deep into the lieutenant’s back. Pulled it back, then in a second time. A third. They knew how to kill, those men of the Palatine Guardians.

A moment of shock. And then a confused massacre. The group by the doors turned on each other, none knowing who to trust. Yazid’s men marched in, their blades already wetted. Short. Brutal.

When it was over, Yazid opened the double doors and slipped inside, a dozen at his back. To his surprise, only one man was waiting for them. The King of Kings of Eternal Medanasis, His Sovereign Majesty of the White, most beloved of Holy Fariph, Malik Fakhr XII. With a wave, Yazid sent his soldiers out, leaving the two of them alone.

‘I assumed you would run,’ said Yazid after a few moments of silence. Malik Fakhr was garbed in his robes of state, the pure white from which the name of his office was derived.

‘I trusted that men would be waiting at the secret exits. I misjudged your heart, but not your head, I think, Yazid.’

‘Indeed, Sovereign Majesty.’ Yazid bowed his head and stood to attention. Malik Fakhr took a seat in the expansive receiving room. The hearth crackled, though its warmth didn’t reach far.

‘I bid you one thing: does my nephew know?’

‘His Sovereign Majesty of the Purple is uninvolved,’ Yazid lied. A kindness. The purple sovereign, junior of the two, was in fact holed up at a hunting lodge waiting for the results of this night.

The white sovereign let out a breath. ‘Good. Thank you, Yazid.’

Drawing his knife, Yazid approached.

‘You realise,’ Malik Fakhr said, ‘that Medanasis shall not survive if we cling to the old ways. Clans and stagnant corps, unable to adapt to the times. We have always adapted. It is the basis of our longevity. Even the Guardians may decline into a burden and require renewal. Is balance and renewal not at the core of our faith? Do you not see that you merely prove the necessity of my actions?’

‘May history judge you kindly for it, Sovereign Majesty of the White. I do not.’

‘You shall do it yourself? Just you?’

‘If that is what you wish, Majesty.’

‘It is, I think. And it shall be quick?’

‘I shall endeavour to make it so.’

‘Good. Good. I was never a man for war, as well you know, Yazid. A harder man might perhaps have foreseen this. A harder man shall come, I hope. My nephew is not that man.’

‘He is not, no.’

‘Do the interests of the Guardians truly come before those of all Medanasis, Yazid?’

‘Our interests are those of all Medanasis.’

‘You believe that, do you? A pity. Would you pray with me, first?’

Yazid could grant the man that much, even if it came from only a desire to extend his final moments. They beseeched the four great Guardian Spirits: the Water Carrier, to protect the empire, and the Wise Lord, to judge with mercy, and the Winged One, to take the soul soon to be freed, and the Sun Bringer, to end this awful night.

‘Come then. Do it.’ The king of kings extended his neck and looked at Yazid down his nose.

‘I’m sorry.’

The knife plunged and withdrew and plunged and withdrew and plunged and withdrew. They knew how to kill, those men of the Palatine Guardians.

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Thank you for reading and, if you enjoyed this story and want to read more, feel more than welcome to subscribe. For my next non-fiction, in two weeks, I’ll be using the end of the year to talk about time and, more specifically, calendars and, more specifically than that, the French Republican Calendar. It’s a good one, trust me.

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According to my regular schedule, my next short story should come on New Year’s Day. I might rejig things to post the following day instead. Either way, that’ll probably be Four-And-A-Half Engagements, a romantic comedy of manners. Alternatively, if I finish it first, Fortune’s Favour, a return to naval fiction and my Gulf Sea War timeline.

Want to keep reading? This might help:

I’m both a reader and writer of fantasy fiction, and fantasy is full of nobility. As is, of course, real history and historical fiction. But what actually is the nobility? What are all these titles? Where did they come from and what do they mean? Today, I hope to explain all that for a lay audience to aid both readers and writers.

My focus will particularly be on the aristocracy of the early modern period, and in particular after the decline of feudalism in England in the 17th century, but in doing so I’ll also explain how the aristocracy came into being and thereby what they looked like before this period. I won’t be touching the Scottish aristocracy with a ten-foot pole, as they’re a whole different kettle of fish (in particular thanks to the clan system), nor the continental European aristocracy, except by comparison. Just be aware that England has a particular system that was in many ways quite different from those around it: systems that I know far less well than the English one. (Though most of this is applicable to the Irish peerage system, because that system was basically just copied over after the English conquest(s).)

This is a long one and is intended to be a general resource that you might refer back to when, for example, trying to work out how someone should be addressed. Feel more than welcome to read it in stages. To aid comprehensibility, I’ll be using some well known fictional examples: the novels of Jane Austen, and the TV shows Downton Abbey and Bridgerton.

What is the Aristocracy?

There are a few terms that get thrown around here: aristocracy, nobility, peerage, gentry, upper-class. These are all related but largely distinct.

In England, the nobility refers only to those who hold titles of peerage — barons, viscounts, earls, marquesses, and dukes — making the terms nobility and peerage one and the same. This means that the nobility is only a few hundred people at any given time; a very different system to continental Europe where nobility was a legal status hereditarily passed down to all children of existing nobles. In Poland, for example, the nobility referred to something like 5% of the entire population by the early modern period. In France, somewhere in the range of 0.5-2% on the eve of the French Revolution. In these systems, the country was neatly and legally divided into common and noble, where the nobility corresponded to the entire upper-class.1

Not so in England. Families that included nobility could be called aristocratic, but that was merely a social distinction. And the vast majority of the upper-class were not not even from aristocratic families, but instead were what was called gentry. (Those of gentle birth.) Once again, this was not a formal legal distinction but instead a social one. Gentry families were merely those who had long been considered gentry. They were, most importantly, those that owned large enough estates to be able to live off of them, meaning that they made their money from rent rather than from work. They married into other gentry families. They attended high society events. They followed strict rules of social behaviour.

To be part of the gentry, then, was to be accepted as such by the rest of the gentry, thanks to meeting those economic and social criteria. It was a system that allowed some fluidity, therefore. A family that fell on hard times might still be considered gentry for a couple of generations, but if they sold their land and abandoned all the trappings of their class, they would soon lose their status. On the other hand, a successful family who bought more land and began marrying into their local gentry neighbours would soon been considered part of the pack.

Again, this is in marked contrast to other systems, under which most of the equivalent to this gentry class held the formal legal distinction of nobility. Under those systems, a commoner could become a noble, but a noble could never become a commoner. In England, the gentry were commoners and the only legal distinction between them and the non-gentry commoners was the fact that many gentry families were armigerous. That is, that they had the right to use a family coat-of-arms as regulated by the College of Arms. This right often confirmed an established family’s gentry status, though families without this right could still be considered gentry.

The English approach also created a system whereby certain branches of a family might be marginal gentry, others more established gentry, while others weren’t gentry at all, and where this marginal gentry often intermarried with the middle class, who sometimes made more wealth from their professions than the marginal gentry did from their land-rents. We see this all the time in Jane Austen’s work, as she wrote mostly about that marginal gentry to which she herself belonged.

The Bennets, for example, are just about clinging onto the trappings of the gentry. Mrs Bennet’s family, however — the Gardiners — are not gentry, but instead tradesmen. Mrs Bennet, we are told, was married to Mr Bennet with a dowry of £5,000 and later inherited a further £4,000 from her father’s death, compared to the £2,000 per year income of Mr Bennet’s estate. In other words, Mrs Bennet was able to bring to the marriage as much as the estate makes in a decade. Nonetheless, this connection is a source of embarrassment for Lizzy when she introduces her middle-class aunt and uncle to Mr Darcy, who is himself a member of the very upper rungs of the gentry, possessing more wealth than many nobles, and with descent from actual nobility. (His maternal grandfather was an earl, which is why his aunt is called Lady Catherine de Bourgh — don’t worry, I’ll explain why later.)

So, there’s the very small number of people with titles who are called nobility/peerage. There’s their families who can be called aristocratic. And there’s the much wider group called the gentry. All of this combined, we can call the upper-class.

Where Did This All Come From?

The origins of the English aristocracy go back to the Norman Conquest, though this system itself was built partially on top of the old Anglo-Saxon system.

The Anglo-Saxons used the term thegn (thane) to refer to the men who made up the military-aristocratic class. They were important landowners who, along with Church leaders, made up the Witan: a council that advised the king and confirmed his succession.

Administratively, Anglo-Saxon England was split into shires that each had their own court and local militia called a fyrd. The king appointed a particular local thegn to govern the shire on his behalf, meaning he controlled that court and fyrd and collected taxes. Ealdorman was the initial title given to these men, though under King Cnut it was changed to earl. (The modern English term ‘alderman’ for municipal officials is also derived from ealdorman.) Particularly under Cnut, given he also ruled over Denmark and Norway and had little time for England, earls were given multiple shires to govern, becoming powerful governors of large parts of the country. They delegated the administration of individual shires to shire reeves, later called sheriffs, who were also drawn from the thegn class. Appointment as earl was never formally hereditary, and yet sons frequently succeeded their fathers, given they they also inherited their fathers’ land and network of inter-familial loyalty with local thegns.

After the Norman Conquest, William I settled a number of his companions with estates in England. These men were called ‘barons of the king’ — not a title, but instead a status, meaning that they held a feudal fiefdom directly underneath the monarch. Keeping the Anglo-Saxon administrative structure partially intact, some of these baronial landowners were appointed as earls, governing shires as their Anglo-Saxon predecessors had done. Merging the Norman and Anglo-Saxon administrative systems, these shires were renamed to counties (though the two terms have been used largely interchangeably ever since), as this is what the Normans called peripheral administrative divisions of the Duchy of Normandy. And because these earls governed counties, they were seen as equivalent in rank to continental counts and their wives were called countesses.

Soon, however, the kings mostly did away with earls as local governors, while at the same time the use of the term ‘earl’ as an honorific title became hereditary. These earls therefore lost their actual role in government, but were still generally the richest and most powerful of the barons. In their place, non-hereditary sheriffs would continue to administrate the various counties. The exception to this were the palatinates: areas of the country, usually at the peripheries, that were placed under the authority of an (often hereditary) governor — sometimes but not always styled as earl — who ruled with some of the powers of a king. (Or, ‘palace’ powers, hence ‘palatinate’.) Those who held feudal fiefdoms under a palatinate were also called barons, but barons of the palatinate rather than of the king.

Barons of the king had to the right to attend to the king’s councils, which over time evolved into Parliament. However, a division emerged. The greater barons would be personally called to Parliament by a writ of summons. (More on that later.) These men actually got to call themselves barons as a title, and were referred to as ‘lord’. (All the earls were part of that group.) On the other hand, lesser barons would assemble to elect two men per county to receive writs of summons and go to Parliament on their behalf. The former group evolved into the peerage/nobility and their gathering would eventually be called the House of Lords. Representatives of the latter group, having feudal baronial relationships but without the formal title of baron or lord, would eventually become the House of Commons. They themselves would evolve into the gentry.

It’s at this point I should point out that England, like most of Europe at the time, had no special title or designation for royal sons. ‘Prince’ was not yet a thing, except for the title of Prince of Wales, which had been granted to the king’s eldest son since the reign of Edward I. This title actually referenced overlordship over Wales rather than being the child of a king. The term ‘prince’ in England referred only and exclusively to the Prince of Wales — a title always and to this day given to the monarch’s eldest son — until the 18th century.

Edward III wanted to use his sons to help administrate his growing kingdom, as he continued to assert English authority over Wales and Ireland and make plays for the French crown, and to confirm their place as second only to him in the noble pecking order. So, he made his eldest son, also called Edward, the Duke of Cornwall in 1337 (which came with palatine powers over the county his dukedom was named after), on top of which he was of course also made Prince of Wales. (Edward is best known today as the Black Prince.) Edward III stole the idea of ‘dukes’ from the continent — in particular France — where they had a special status above other nobles, only half a step down from that of the king himself.

Having decided that he did a great job making his eldest son the Duke of Cornwall, King Edward III made all his other sons dukes too. Specifically, the Dukes of Clarence, Lancaster, York, and Gloucestershire, in order of descending age. Clarence was made governor of Ireland while Lancaster was given palatine powers over Lancashire, with all their dukedoms confirming their preeminence over other peers. The practice of giving royal sons dukedoms, which placed them above barons and earls, continues to this day, and most dukedoms have historically been given to royal sons. (Including to illegitimate ones. Right now there is a Duke of St. Albans — named after my home town — who is descended from the eldest of Charles II’s two sons with Nell Gwyn, a famous actress.)

As it turns out, by the way, Edward III perhaps didn’t do the best job. What he had actually done was give these royal scions large powerbases from which they could challenge royal authority. Soon, only the Lancastrian and Yorkist lines of the Plantagenet family were left standing and had what can best be described as a strong disagreement over which should hold the crown. History calls this disagreement the Wars of the Roses and, by its end, the Plantagenet family was been almost entirely destroyed, out of the ashes of which the Tudors emerged.

In the century after Edward III invented dukes, two other titles were imported from France: viscounts and marquesses. These were, like the title of earl, an additional honour below that of a dukedom but above a mere barony. Specifically, viscounts were just below earls in honour (as they emerged from the idea of being a vice-count, a deputy count who in France would help a count administer a county — basically the French equivalent of English sheriffs) while marquesses were slightly above earls in honour (because, again under the French system, they ruled a ‘march’ (borderland), making them the first line of the defence, which came with extra prestige and usually more land and autonomy).

These rounded out of the five ranks of the English peerage (baron, viscount, earl, marquess, and duke — the same five ranks, although with different names, that are common across western, central, and northern European noble systems) which, with the decline of feudalism in the 17th century, stopped being attached to feudal fiefdoms. Instead, they were mere titles of honour, which came with the added bonus of a seat in the House of Lords and some special legal protections.2 And, of course, all of them have a female equivalent for if they’re ever inherited by or granted to a woman3: baroness, viscountess, countess, marchioness, and duchess.

Some mention should also be made of baronets. Baronetcies were an even later invention of the early 17th century, are not a peerage/nobility rank, and never entitled the holder to the seat in the House of Lords. They are however hereditary, and so often get included. The best way to explain them is to say that they are hereditary knighthoods.

The very last title I’ll mention is that of prince, which I already teased earlier. Prince is not a title in the English peerage, nor is anyone the prince ‘of’ anywhere, except the Prince of Wales. However, since the Hanoverians came to power, starting with George I in 1714, royal children (and the children of royal sons) have been styled as prince or princess. Princes are usually also given a dukedom or earldom upon coming of age or marriage, but nonetheless they are most often known as princes. Today, King Charles III’s sons are Prince William, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall4, Rothesay5, and Cambridge, and Prince Henry (more commonly called Harry), Duke of Sussex. Furthermore, the eldest daughter of the monarch is commonly styled as ‘princess royal’, a style currently borne by Charles’ sister Anne. All of this is at the discretion of the monarch, however, and the conventions have changed overtime.

Aristocratic Inheritance

All noble systems have what is called a ‘fount of honour’: the entity which grants all titles. In England, of course, that entity is the monarch and this is done through writs of summons or letters patent. These are two ways that titles are granted and create slightly different systems of inheritance.

Letters patent are the more common method, and the universal method used to create peers since the end of the medieval era. They specifically create a new peerage, naming the person it’s granted to, the rank and name of the title, and explicitly laying out who can inherit. Almost always, they specify that a title can pass to ‘male heirs of the body lawfully begotten’. In other words, to sons born to married parents. No adoption, no bastards, no women. This isn’t required, however, and some letters patent or parliamentary acts specify a different form of inheritance that does allow some or all female descendants to inherit6. Regardless, the title will continue to pass down as long as there are heirs who can inherit it, held by a single person at a time, following the senior still extant line. (The system of primogeniture.) If ever the person who was originally granted the title runs out of eligible descendants, the title becomes extinct. At that point, the monarch is free to grant it again. As a result of this, many titles have been created multiple times.

Writs of summons are a little different: they are the legal mechanism by which someone is called to sit in Parliament. To this day, after an election, all newly elected candidates are issued with writs and this, rather than their election per se, is legally what turns them into Members of Parliament (MPs). Writs are also required in order to sit in the House of Lords. So, everyone with a peerage title would be issued with a new writ of summons for every new Parliament. But what if the monarch issued a writ of summons to the House of Lords to someone who didn’t have a peerage title? Well, then they have effectively been made a peer by implication. (Always with the rank of baron.) This is how the original peers, and indeed the concept of being a peer, got created: by being repeatedly summoned to Parliament personally in a way that established the unique status of the men being summoned.

The problem with writs of summons is that they don’t specify a form of inheritance. But don’t worry: Common Law has established a form of inheritance over the centuries. This form of inheritance allows the title to pass to ‘heirs of the body lawfully begotten’, which sounds almost exactly like what letters patent usually say. But can you spot the difference? That’s right, all peerages created by writ of summons can pass to girls. The technical term is that they pass to ‘heirs-general’ rather than merely male heirs. So, peerages created by writs of summons are inherited following the same primogeniture system as other peerages but, if the male line dies out, can also be inherited through the female line.

Except there’s another complication. When we’re talking about sons, the title passes to the eldest, following standard primogeniture rules. But the system doesn’t care about the age of girls for some reason, so when there are two or more daughters, they have equal right to inherit; equal claim on the title. But the title can only be held by one person at a time. So… what happens? Abeyance happens: the title ceases to be held by anyone, it just disappears into the ether. If ever the other female line(s) die out, so only one remains that has a claim to the title, then the title stops being in abeyance and can now be claimed by that single remaining line.

This is confusing so I’ll use an example. A baron whose title was created by writ of summons has two daughters. When he dies, both inherit a 50% claim on the title, which enters abeyance. The older daughter has a son and a daughter, then dies. The son, because sons are preferred, inherits his mother’s 50% claim. Then, the second daughter dies without having any children. With the extinction of the other claimant, the first daughter’s son is now the only claimant left and therefore gets the title. Usually, abeyance is either sorted out within a generation, or else is never sorted out and the title de facto ceases to exist, but there are a couple of cases involving titles finally having a single claimant left after centuries in abeyance. Abeyance, it should be said, can’t happen to titles created by letters patent because, when they allow women to inherit, they do care about age.

Estates were inherited in a similar way to titles: by a single male heir following the rules of primogeniture. This is in contrast to most continental systems, which divided land between male heirs. This also meant that if someone had a title, the title and estate would be inherited together. What about younger sons and daughters? Well, they could still inherit liquid capital, stocks, and moveable goods, which they could use to set themselves up. (For daughters, this inheritance was often paid ‘in advance’, if you will, in the form of a dowry.) But, putting that aside, sons had to find a career (more on that later) and daughters had to find a husband.

But what if there were no sons? Well, daughters couldn’t inherit titles (usually) as we’ve covered, but they could inherit land in the absence of any brothers. In that case, the estate would be split between all daughters equally rather than going to a single heir.7 However, this could be a problem for a few reasons. First, the resultant, split estates might be too small to support the gentry lifestyle. Second, those estates and their wealth would pass out of the paternal family and into the family of the heiress(es)’s husband(s).

And what about a situation whereby a title holder has only daughters but there is another male line heir to the title? Maybe the title is set to be inherited by a distant male cousin who doesn’t have an estate of their own, meanwhile the estate is due to be split between the current title holder’s multiple daughters. In that case, not only do you have the above problems, but also the title and estate would cease to be jointly held and the new title holder might be left impoverished, which would be particularly embarrassing for the family.

To prevent this situation, families could create an entail: a legal mechanism that forced an estate to stay together and be inherited by a single male heir for three generations at a time. If there was a title, the entail would also ensure that the estate and title were inherited together. Entails are the secret antagonists of lots of stories involving noble inheritance, like Downton Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, because they cause distant male cousins (Matthew Crawley and Mr Collins respectively) to inherit estates rather than daughters who are therefore left with nothing. Of course, a very common solution was therefore to marry the male heir (a cousin, but hopefully quite a distant one) to one of those passed-over daughters. Entails also prevented those bound by them from splitting or selling off any part of the estate, or even doing things to reduce its value, such as logging. This could make entails annoyingly inflexible even for those who benefitted from them, which is why they were legally restricted to binding just three generations at a time, and were abolished in the 20th century.

The Granting of Titles

To inherit a title, a title must first exist. You might assume that all titles were already old by the early modern period: relics of the medieval era, still chugging along. However, as I’ve already alluded to, you’d be dead wrong. In fact, the monarch was handing out titles almost constantly — all by letters patent by the early modern period, so following the inheritance rules for letters patent I set out above. Great, you think, I’d like a title. But how could you secure one?

Well the first and most obvious way is to be born royal. As I mentioned in the history section, princes — and even illegitimate royal sons — are usually made dukes (at birth, upon coming of age, or upon marriage, depending on the era). Indeed, the majority of dukedoms are held by royal sons and their descendants. More minor royals might instead get a lesser title, usually an earldom.

Second, titles that had already existed and then went extinct were often recreated and granted to another branch of the family or someone else with a connection to the title. So, a title might go extinct but, to revive it, might be granted anew to a female line descendant or perhaps a brother-in-law. This was technically a new creation of a title, but was really just a way of keeping the old title going.

Third, titles were granted as an honour for service to the king and/or state. High ranking military officers were often granted titles, as were long-standing courtiers. It’s no accident that Britain’s two most successful generals of the early modern era both got made dukes: John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. That they were made dukes — a title usually reserved for royalty — show just how much the monarch and government wished to honour them.

Finally, titles were granted for political reasons. Afterall, one of the defining aspects of holding a peerage title — one I keep harping on about because it’s really important — was that it granted the holder a seat in the House of Lords. So, if the current House of Lords is hostile to the government, maybe you make a few more peers that agree with the government in order to get legislation passed. (The act of creating lots of new pro-government peers to force through legislation is called ‘flooding the Lords’. The Lords has never truly been flooded, but both the 1832 Great Reform Act and 1911 Parliament Act were passed under threat of it.) A politician might also be elevated to the Lords so that they no longer have to stand for reelection in the House of Commons — or if they had already failed to secure reelection. (Ministers must have a seat in either the Commons or Lords, so a peerage title was the only way a politician could become or stay a minister despite not holding a seat in the House of Commons.) Finally, a politician who wanted to retire from the Commons might be given a peerage title so that they could continue to lend their expertise and act as an elder statesman. Prime ministers who weren’t already peers were routinely given titles when they resigned/retired, for example.8

To sum up, if you want to become a peer in the early modern era my advice is to be born royal, have a connection to an extinct title, or enter the military, royal household, or politics. Good luck, I guess. Once you’ve invented your time machine, I assume these would be mere trivialities.

Addressing the Nobility

You might think that you would call the Earl of Warwick ‘the Earl of Warwick’. But no no no. His title might be Earl of Warwick, but when addressing an English peer they are always merely ‘lord’. So, Lord Warwick, not the Earl of Warwick. This is regardless of rank: from baron to duke, all are merely ‘lord’ followed by the name of their title. Other countries don’t do this, probably because it’s very confusing.

Here I’ll rely on pop-culture again. In Downtown Abbey, we meet the Earl of Grantham and the Marquess of Hexham. However, they are actually called Lord Grantham and Lord Hexham. The result, of course, is that you cannot actually work out someone’s rank merely from hearing them addressed: you just have to know them in advance. Our first confusion, but by no means our last.

(Baronets, which as I already said are not actual titles of nobility, are also not called lord. Instead, they are addressed like knights, as ‘sir’ — or ‘dame’ for women — followed by their first or full name. Note: it’s never Sir/Dame [last name]. To take the example of my favourite author: it’s Sir Terry Pratchett or Sir Terry, but never Sir Pratchett.)

Speaking of these titles, what are they actually named after? If the king wants to make you an earl, where do you become the earl of? Initially, when these were feudal arrangements, usually it referenced the actual name of the lands attached to the title, or a town nearby. As time went on, however, sometimes they referenced nothing more than a family name, or just some town or village the holder had some connection to. Today, some titles are named after counties, some after cities/towns/villages, and some, as mentioned, after families.

When talking to a peer, you might opt to use a style of address so you do not always have to use their full title. The proper address is ‘my lord/lady’ or, in the third person, ‘his/her lordship/ladyship’. Dukes and duchesses, however, get to be special are instead styled as ‘Your Grace’. (His/Her Grace, in third person.) Princes and princesses, even when they also hold actual peerage titles, are always ‘Your Royal Highness’. (His/Her Royal Highness, shortened to HRH in written form.) And, though it’s somewhat beyond the scope of this article, the monarch is ‘Your Majesty’. (‘His/Her Majesty’, shortened to HM.)

Courtesy Titles

It’s not, however, merely the actual nobility who get to be address as though they’re nobility. That, of course, would be far too straight forwards. Instead, the spouses and children of peers are also often able to make use of what look like noble titles but are instead just titles of social convention. These are called ‘courtesy titles’.

First and most obviously, the wife of a male noble gets to use the female equivalent of her husband’s title, despite not being a peer/noble herself. So, the wife of the Duke of St Albans is the Duchess of St Albans. Along with that comes all the same styles of address and other honorifics. The same courtesy title is not extended to the husbands of female nobles, (which, as we’ve already discussed, are historically rare but not impossible) nor the spouses of peers in same-sex relationships.9

If such a wife outlives her husband, she can still continue to use all of his titles and styles of address, becoming what is called a ‘dowager’. Lets once more grasp at pop-culture: in Bridgerton, the holder of the Bridgerton family’s title is the eldest brother, Anthony, Viscount Bridgerton. (A title named after their family name.) His widowed mother is the Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton. She is still called Lady Bridgerton, with all the same styles of address. In Downton Abbey, Lord Grantham’s mother has the same status. Of course, this can be confusing when there is both a dowager and wife of the title’s current holder, both of whom are therefore addressed with the same courtesy title. The term ‘dowager’ reflects the tradition of a ‘dower’ — an amount of property, fixed under Magna Carta at 1/3 of a man’s total lands — that would be left to his widow upon his death and only inherited by his heir(s) upon the widow’s own death. By the early modern period, formal dowers were no longer a thing, but widows did still often hold land in their own right.10 (Dowers and dowries are related but distinct concepts, it should also be noted.)

Courtesy titles are also extended to the children of peers, but here it gets much more complicated.

The sons of dukes and marquesses are styled as ‘lord’ followed by their name. The daughters of dukes, marquesses, and earls, are styled as ‘lady’ followed by their name. In Downton Abbey, the Earl of Grantham’s three daughters are Lady Mary Crawley, Lady Edith Crawley, and Lady Sybille Crawley. If he had a son, however, that son would be merely Mr Crawley. If he were instead a marquess or duke, his son would be Lord [firstname] Crawley. (Except, as I’m about to explain, his oldest son probably would get a special courtesy title. I’m getting to it.) The children of barons and viscounts are merely mr and miss. (Such as the Bridgerton siblings, whose father was a viscount.) These courtesy titles can be shortened to ‘lord/lady [firstname]’ but never ‘lord/lady [lastname]’, as that might be mistaken for an actual title. Let’s imagine that the Bridgerton title, which is the same as their family name, was marquess. Then the second son would be Lord Benedict Bridgerton: if you were to shorten that to Lord Bridgerton rather than Lord Benedict, it would be indistinguishable from his older brother’s actual peerage title.

Courtesy titles of this kind can also be used by the wives of men with the right to use them. In the above hypothetical, Lord Benedict Bridgerton’s wife would be Lady Benedict Bridgerton. (Not her own name; shortened to Lady Benedict.)

(And hey, look: now you understand why Mr Darcy’s aunt — the daughter of an earl — is called Lady Catherine de Burgh. It’s a courtesy title she can use because she’s an earl’s daughter. Told you we’d get to it.)

The husbands of those with these courtesy titles do not get to use any equivalent, though their wives can keep using them after marriage. Back to Downton Abbey: when Lady Mary Crawley marries Mr Mathew Crawley, she remains Lady Mary Crawley. When she marries Mr Henry Talbot, she becomes Lady Mary Talbot, changing her name but keeping her courtesy title. Lady Sybille Crawley similarly becomes Lady Sybille Branson. Their husbands remain merely ‘mr’. Their sister, as she marries the Marquess of Hexham, instead uses the higher courtesy title of Lady Hexham.

But there’s an even more complicated case where courtesy titles get used: the eldest sons (and thereby heirs) of dukes, marquesses, and earls. These guys get to use one of their father’s lower ranked titles as a courtesy title for themselves. This works because most peers have multiple titles of different ranks. So, you might be a marquess, but simultaneously be an earl and a baron. The Duke of Wellington, for example, was also the Marquess of Wellington, Marquess Douro, Earl of Wellington, Viscount Wellington, and Baron Douro. (This is as good a time as any to also mention that whether titles include an ‘of’ is largely arbitrary. If they’re named after a family name then they never do; otherwise they usually do but don’t always.)

So, the Duke of Wellington’s eldest son used Marquess Douro as a courtesy title before his father died, and was therefore called Lord Duoro. (Using Marquess of Wellington would’ve been overly confusing, as then they both would have been called Lord Wellington.) The son uses this title but does not actually possess the title and, to try to avoid some confusion, is referred to without the definitive article. (So, in this example, as Marquess Douro rather than the Marquess Douro.) When the father holds multiple lower ranked titles, as the Duke of Wellington did (and indeed still does — the title and family are still extant), then the son basically gets to pick which one to use. They’ll usually use the highest ranked one while avoiding one with the same name as their father’s title (as in my example), though with old families there is often a traditional title always used as the heir’s courtesy title.

All of this, of course, means that how such people are addressed often changes multiple times over their life. To take an example: Earl Grey, the great British Prime Minister. (Abolisher of slavery, extender of the electorate, scourge of corrupt constituencies, namesake of decent tea.) At birth, he was merely Mr Charles Grey. In 1801, his father was made Baron Grey, but that didn’t give the son any kind of courtesy title. In 1806, however, his father was also made Earl Grey and Viscount Howick. Charles, as eldest son, therefore got to use Viscount Howick as a courtesy title. A year later, his father died and he inherited as the 2nd Earl Grey. So, from Mr Grey to Lord Howick (courtesy title) to Lord Grey (substantive title) in just two years. (Funnily enough, this was actually of some annoyance to Grey himself. He had wanted to stay in the House of Commons, but his father accepting a peerage and then dying booted him out of the Commons and into the House of Lords, where he stayed until his death in 1845.)

And, like always, the wives of these eldest sons of earls, marquesses, and dukes get to use the female version and style as their own courtesy title.

What did the Aristocracy Do?

As mentioned before, one of the defining aspects of the upper-class — gentry, nobility, whatever — was that they did not work, or at least did not have to. They owned landed estates and made money from rent: from tenant farmers who would rent a tenancy, which included a house and some land.

When it came to those only marginally hanging on to their gentry status, however, they might have to supplement rental income by actually farming some of their land themselves. Taking the land ‘in hand’, they would hire people to work the land and then directly sell the results, which was generally more profitable than merely skimming rent off the top of someone else’s farming operation. Other ways to make money included selling logging, mining, and quarrying rights. They might also manage an investment portfolio. The point is that they’re making money off their land and existing wealth rather than from wage-work, which was generally seen as demeaning.

However, as we’ve already discussed, younger sons inherited no land. They might, in richer families, inherit enough capital to be able to purchase an estate or live off dividends from investments. (Or their brother’s charity.) But, for less wealthy families, that just wasn’t possible. There was no getting around it: some of these guys had to work.

So, a few professions were singled out as acceptable for those of upper-class status. In particular, professions that provided a service to the king or God: the military, clergy, the legal professions, and careers connected to the government and politics. (Working in a government ministry or as a diplomat, for example.)

First, briefly, the military, which can be separated into the army and navy. Now, in some other countries, there were formal rules blocking commoners from attaining high military rank. However as we’ve already covered, most of the upper-class were commoners in England, in that they didn’t hold peerage titles. Luckily, other methods existed to keep the officer corps a mostly gentleman-only affair.

The army, for example, practiced a system of ‘purchased commissions’. If you wanted to be a commissioned officer, you had to literally buy the commission off the last guy who held it. This meant that, to become an officer and rise up the ranks, you had to spend money that most people just didn’t have. In contrast, if you were rich and determined, you could rise up the ranks very quickly indeed. The Duke of Wellington, for example, though he was undoubtable a capable officer, provides a great example of this system: he was able to rise from captain to lieutenant-colonel in just a few months in 1793 merely by buying higher commissions.

The navy didn’t use purchased commissions, but instead another system to keep it all an old boys’ club. An aspiring officer had to begin as a midshipman, you see, which wasn’t a commissioned rank. Instead, who a captain took on as a midshipman was largely at his own discretion, so of course he took on mostly the sons of his friends. Only after at least six-years at sea as a midshipman was an aspiring officer allowed to take the lieutenant’s exam, which was an interview before a group of captains, the outcome of which was entirely at their discretion. If a candidate passed the exam, they were a lieutenant, but still had to hope there was a ship they could serve on. It helped, of course, if you had connections who could recommend you for any post that opened up.

This was a consistent problem for naval officers: there were always fewer ships than officers hoping to serve on them, and who got assigned — the only way to earn your captaincy — was at the discretion of men who tended to care more about doing favours for their friends and political allies than actually promoting the most competent men. Once a lieutenant was promoted to captain, there was only one higher rank: admiral. There were always nine admirals (the admiral, vice-admiral, and rear-admiral of the three colour squadrons: red, white, and blue) and, when a post opened up, it always went to whoever had been serving as a captain the longest. (i.e. by strict seniority.) Becoming an admiral was a surefire way to ensure your fortune, as admirals got a share of the prize money (reward money for captured enemy ships) from any ship under their authority, so every officer wanted to become a captain as fast as possible, to begin their slow rise by seniority through the captains list. Jane Austen’s two youngest brothers were both naval officers. Frank was made a captain at the age of 26, an admiral at 56, and afterwards had many long and profitable years at that rank. Charles, who lacked a patron with as much pull as Frank’s, was made a captain when he was 31 and it took until he was 67 for him to slowly rise up the captains list, giving him only six-years as an admiral before he died.

Moving on, the Anglican Church practiced a strange and interesting system at the time. Most parish churches had been built by local landlords who reserved the right to pick the local priest. That local priest (either a rector or vicar) got access to a house and small amount of land set aside for them, called a ‘living’, and collected tithes from their parishioners. (Rectors got all the tithes, whereas vicars only got certain tithes, with the rest going to the landlord who controlled the living.) Between farming on their living and collecting their tithes, they could generally eke out a lifestyle that just about kept them respectable to their gentry peers. Priests could even be appointed to multiple livings to bolster their fortunes, at which point they would hire a curate to minister their other parishes for them. Jane Austen wrote about this relationship between priest and landlord a lot. It’s why Mr Collins is so obsessed with Lady Catherine’s favour and why it was in Mr Darcy’s power to deny Mr Wickham the appointment as a parish priest he feels he was owed. And speaking of Austen’s family, her father and two of her other brothers (Charles and Henry) were all clergymen. Another of her brothers, Edward, was adopted as heir by their wealthy relations the Knights and, after he inherited, Edward was left as the controller of a number of livings. (Including the one his father had originally held, where the Austen siblings had grown up, which he rebuilt in order to grant to one of his younger sons.)

In the legal professions, the ultimate aim was usually to become some form of judge. However, you couldn’t go straight from university into the judiciary. Usually, therefore, gentlemen with legal degrees first became barristers and worked their way up. Here, I have to explain an oddity of the British legal system: the distinction between barristers and solicitors. Barristers — those called ‘to the bar’ — are trial lawyers who are hired to appear in court for a specific case. That’s basically their whole job: to appear in court and argue cases. Solicitors, on the other hand, do the vast majority of legal work: managing clients, drawing up and reviewing contracts, all that stuff. Solicitors cannot appear at court, so hire a barrister to do that for them. (This has been relaxed in recent years, but is still broadly how it works.) Barristers traditionally had a higher social status and all belong to one of the four Inns of Court in London: these combination guilds and social clubs, namely Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, and Gray’s Inn. Also, to become a judge, you have to have been a barrister, not a solicitor. Gentlemen would more commonly be barristers and then judges, whereas solicitors were more likely to be middle-class.

As for the government, there were a whole host of careers a gentleman could take up. One that wouldn’t pay was getting themselves a seat in the House of Commons, because MPs didn’t earn any salary. (In fact, giving MPs a salary so working-class people could afford to stand for election was one of the demands of the radical Chartist movement, most active in the 1840s.) However, a gentleman might instead angle for an appointment as a ministerial secretary or in the diplomatic service. Diplomatic representatives in particular, because they had to treat with foreign royalty and ingratiate themselves with another country’s noble class, were usually drawn from aristocratic families. To send a social inferior would be an insult to that foreign government.

Let’s put aside the question of those who had to work, however, and ask this: what did that true aristocracy, the richest of the rich, do with their time? They could, of course, enter one of these professions. If they did, it wasn’t for the money, but instead on the understanding that they could soon rise to be generals, bishops, judges, or ministers. Otherwise, when not managing their estates, the upper class spent much of their time at their leisure: going over to each others houses and, especially, hunting and shooting.

An aristocratic family’s year was split in two. Half the year, roughly speaking, was spent in London during what is called the ‘social season’. (Originally this began in October or November and ran until May or June, but in the late-19th and 20th centuries moved to begin in January or February or even later and run until July or August.) Here, they would go to balls and the theatre and rub shoulders with families from all over the country, making connections and, in particular, planning marriages. This London social season coincided very deliberately with when Parliament was open for business. After all, the House of Lords was literally composed of all those with peerage titles, while the House of Commons was largely made up of the gentry and aristocracy until the 20th century. So most of these families had to be in London anyway, and decided they may as well make a party out of it.

The rest of the year, which in particular corresponded to various hunting and shooting seasons, was instead spent on their estates. These were also the warmer months, especially under the original 17th-18th century calendar, which meant they could avoid the awful stink of a London summer while spending the colder months in their smaller London townhouses, which were cheaper to heat than their grand country houses.

It was also during the London social season that unmarried aristocratic girls who were ‘out’ in society had to follow a particularly prescriptive set of behavioural rules. (Being ‘out’ meant that they could participate in society and, in particular, were entertaining offers of marriage. For high aristocrats, girls often came ‘out’ by being presented to the monarch.) There were only very few places they were allowed to go, always chaperoned, and never alone with men. This is in contrast to the much laxer rules of behaviour outside the social season and outside of London. (Austen, for example, constantly writes her unmarried men and women as being alone together without any suggestion of scandal, because in the countryside those rules didn’t apply as strictly.)

I should additionally make clear that the London social season was mostly for the true aristocrats, rather than obscure country gentry. Those lesser gentry would instead stay on their estates all year round — besides anything else, they probably couldn’t afford the expense of a London townhouse — and only intermittently visit London for a few days at a time. We see this in Pride and Prejudice, where Darcy and the Bingleys relocate to London for the season while the Bennets stay in Hertfordshire, only a few of them occasionally venturing ‘into town’. (As London was often called, at the time.)

Well That was Rather a Lot

So that’s the English aristocracy of the early modern era, particularly during the two-century period from the mid-17th to mid-19th century. Of course, even within this period things could change dramatically and I would suggest you use this information more as a jumping off point for further individual research and reading rather than as an exhaustive guide.

Throughout, you may have noticed the central role of Parliament in all this. There’s a reason for that: when aristocrats weren’t doing all this other stuff, they were mostly off governing the country. They were not just social or economic elites, they were political elites at their very core.

Understanding Parliament and the government broadly is essential to understanding the aristocracy of this period. However, that’s a huge topic and I have no intention of growing this behemoth even further. Disappointed? Good! Because I fully intent to grapple with those topics — how early modern Britain was governed, the development of its politics, and the role of Parliament — in a dedicated article. So, if you’re interested, subscribe to ensure you won’t miss it.

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Thank you for reading. It was nice to finally have an outlet for all this useless knowledge. If you found this useful, or even if you didn’t, feel more than welcome to like, share your thoughts, and subscribe for more tangentially related to this sort of thing.

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My next short story will be released in two weeks and should be The Assassination of Malik Fakhr XII, about a regicidal conspiracy and inspired by the conflicts between the Janissary corps and Ottoman sultans, in particular the 1807 coup against Selim III. For my next non-fiction, released two weeks after that, I’ll be using the end of the year as an excuse to talk about one of my niche abiding fascinations: the French Republican Calendar. It’ll be fun, I swear.

‘We need patrols to swing around the Lydesi western flank; give us some idea of their strength and formation across the Chaleauroux,’ said Count il’Casime, General of the Southern Armies.

‘Yes sir, I’ll see to it,’ Geldrun replied. They were sat in il’Casime’s command tent, both sweating under heavy canvass and a warm southern sun. ‘Though I should also bring your attention to an increased Lydesi mounted presence around Goyn.’

The Lead Count, as they had taken to calling their commander on account of all the bullet wounds, thought for a moment. ‘The First Army’s second brigade are still camped there, yes?’

‘On our extreme east flank, yes sir. I worry the Lydesi might try to isolate them or get into our lines of communication.’

The general nodded. ‘Find them some additional cavalry support.’

‘The Fifth Dragoon Column, I thought,’ said Geldrun.

‘They need to keep a battalion back, but the rest could do it. I’ll send the order to il’Valant. And I need fresh maps for the area south of Laishon.’

‘I’m working on it. The maps I have include incorrectly marked fords — those of seasons gone by, not accounting for the heavier rain flow of last autumn.’

‘Very good, Colonel.’ il’Casime always used Geldrun’s rank, in place of his title. He was fine with that: he hadn’t worked his way up the ranks of the artillery corps just for everyone to think of him as Lord il’Prolais, the Grand Duke’s youngest cousin. ‘Speaking of the lieutenant-general, il’Valant complained to me today of a lack of shot for his guns.’

‘He’s been pestering me about it for a week, sir. And his gunnery officers for even longer. They’ll get it as soon as we do.’

‘Frankly, he should never have bothered me with it,’ said il’Casime.

A reprimand, perhaps implicitly of Geldrun himself. The general tapped his hat, on the table between the two seated men, for emphasis. They were alone, il’Casime firmly believing that full staff meetings were for giving orders, not discussion. Not that he tended to invite discussion during their private appointments either. A man of over fifty years, near two decades Geldrun’s senior, he was as stuck in his ways as an old sergeant’s wife.

‘No, he should not have. I’ll see to it, sir.’ Geldrun’s motto, this past year as commander of artillery and de facto chief quartermaster, chief adjutant, and chief intelligence officer for the Southern Armies of the Grand Duchy of Prolais.

‘And then there’s the Savarians to deal with,’ sighed il’Casime.

Their allies in this ill-fated war, not that you would know it from all the demands their generals had been making.

‘They’re still insisting on separate stores, in spite of their own shortages,’ Geldrun said. ‘But the Marquis of Louro’s army could swing west and check the Lydesi advance, while the rest of the Savarian forces dig in to our rear.’

‘You’re feeling bold today, Colonel.’

‘We need to do something, sir,’ Geldrun replied with a shrug. ‘We cannot just keep withdrawing all the way to Tabresorteux. And if an engagement knocks some sense into our allies, all the better.’

‘I’ll raise it with them tonight. That’ll be all.’

Geldrun added the discussed items to the top of his mental agenda, supplanting the other logistical, intelligence, cartographic, and myriad additional issues he had been planning to address whenever he could carve out the time. He rose, flattening his black artillery uniform – a stark contrast to the deep blue of the rest of the Grand Ducal Armies – retrieved his hat, and exited the tent.

***

War quickly became monotonous, in those long stretches between engagements. Geldrun’s war had settled into a steady rhythm, his days taken over by meetings, inspections, and personally seeing to whatever else he had the time for, his nights for writing orders and letters and ledgers and reports by candlelight. Occasionally, he slept. When he couldn’t, coffee sufficed.

And always, always, he was scheming. Schemes were what plans were called if you had to keep them hidden, especially from your supposed allies and fellow officers. In Geldrun’s experience, any plan could be improved through its translation into a scheme. When fighting a losing war against a superior foe, slowing backing up against a wall, schemes were the last best tool available to the industrious officer.

A new scheme was coming to fruition, assuming he was interpreting the reports correctly. It would be today or never.

‘Lieutenant,’ he called. He looked over what he had written and, satisfied, sanded, folded, and sealed the two orders.

‘My lord?’ inquired Geldrun’s adjutant as he poked his head through the divider that nominally separated their offices in Geldrun’s own command tent. A second divider hid his cot.

The colonel addressed the letters and handed them to the young lieutenant.

‘For Lieutenant-Colonel il’Darsaix of the Fifth Dragoons,’ he said as the gave over the first. ‘Tell him it’ll make more sense when he gets the other orders he is about to receive. And to be discrete.’

il’Darsaix had only taken command of his column when his predecessor fell at the Second Battle of Mounet. He was a good officer, deserving of the opportunity. If he did as instructed, Geldrun would make sure to secure the promotion in rank that should be rights accompany the man’s promotion in command.

‘And this,’ Geldrun continued, passing the second, ‘is for Captain Baltin, Third Horse Artillery Troop. Make sure he understands the core of the instruction: he is to redeploy just north of Goyn and put himself under il’Darsaix’s command, who he will meet there.’

Baltin would understand. The horse artillery was Geldrun’s own mewling baby, formed but a few years earlier based on his proposal. Inspired by the similar units he had observed in Lydesis, when he had been military attaché there – able to keep pace with fast moving cavalry and rapidly redeploy to provide the kind of close gunnery support that standard foot artillery could not. They had proved formidable, though the Lydesi seemed to think it rather unfair that another army used their own doctrines against them.

Only five troops, a total of thirty light guns, had been formed thus far, and Geldrun kept all of them under his personal command, distributing them at his discretion to the cavalry brigades and then recalling them back to him. Putting his limited resources where they were most needed to apply maximal pressure.

The adjutant departed and, after a few minutes of reading through scouting reports, Geldrun followed him out, calling for his horse.

He was at the heart of the First Army’s main encampment, where he had stayed the past few days to be close to the general. Soon, he would need to go over to the Third Army, and maybe inspect the outlying camps of the brigades closest to the enemy. Or perhaps check on the rear of their forces and make a personal inspection of their depots.

Not that any of this would last for long. A week, they had sat on this ground. Geldrun gave it another week until they upped sticks and marched a little more north. Gave a little more ground. Maybe there would be another inconclusive battle in the meantime, or maybe they would avoid one. Either way, the road led north, back the way they had marched the previous year to head off the Lydesi invasion.

Small victories had held the Lydesi back last year, chief amongst them the First Battle of Mounet, of which Geldrun himself had been hailed the unlikely hero. The Lydesi army’s lines of communication back over the mountains that divided their two nations had been too disrupted to bring in reinforcements over the following winter. As the weather turned, so too had their fate.

Rain melt opened up new passes through the mountains. The Second Battle of Mounet had bloodied the Prolaisians and sent them into retreat, though a battle at Lons had prevented it from being a rout and the Siege of Myres had allowed them time to recover. Withdraw until we meet the Savarians, coming to reinforce us, then turn and beat back the invaders. That had been the plan. The Prolaisian and Savarian armies had met up two weeks back. They were still withdrawing.

And, throughout, Geldrun had seen to everything. Provisioning an army of the run – requisitioning supplies from the civilians they were abandoning. The burning of a dozen bridges and razing of half as many forts, to prevent the Lydesi from using them. When six-and-twenty cannons had been caught out of position, soon to be overrun during the slow retreat, only saved by yet another scheme – this one involving two dragoon companies, a mess of carefully contradictory orders, and a number of hastily painted logs.

He was holding together an army with grit and bravado. It couldn’t continue. It had to.

With a sigh, Geldrun mounted his horse – a steady, dependable, and above all predictable gelding he had bought during his time in Lydesis. He was comfortable around the animals, but only up to a point. The idea of riding to battle on a dumb beast, capable of bolting at any moment, would’ve been bemusing if it wasn’t so terrifying. He didn’t know how the cavalrymen did it.

Hoshang – that was the steed’s name; a joke at a friend’s expense – assumed his customary plodding pace, which suited Geldrun just fine. Gave him time to think, as he started on the path through the gargantuan camp towards Lieutenant-General il’Valant’s own base of operations, on its north-eastern side.

Fifteen-thousand soldiers called the camp a loose and exceedingly temporary home, the majority of the First Army’s strength – the rest being spread between smaller camps to cover the Lydesi lines of advance. Far more men than had ever been meant to camp together, packed into canvass with two shirts and a single coat per enlisted man. The only thing louder than the noise was the smell.

Morale was a problem and, like all problems, Geldrun’s to deal with. Not really because of the defeats and the retreating – the soldiers didn’t seem to much care about that. No, it was the waiting, the inaction, that seemed to bother them. Gave them too much time to think and grow idle. Time to find alcohol and dalliances and make a general nuisance of themselves. Of course, they could be sent on patrols, made to practice at arms and drill, but even they saw the that such tasks were intended only to occupy them.

An impossible problem to solve, but it could be mitigated. That was what Geldrun was reduced to: endless mitigation. No issue dealt with, only made small enough to be ignored in favour of the larger, more immediate problems.

He arrived. il’Valant had taken over a public house and postal office that sat at the crossroads around which the army was camped. That and a few farmhouses were the only buildings for miles around and all had been requisitioned. Geldrun had himself been offered a room but preferred to stay isolated to avoid unnecessary interruptions to his work. He announced himself, gave over his reins to some soldier on guard duty, and marched in.

It was dark. Low ceilinged with small windows. The common room, in usual times, converted into the First Army’s headquarters. Filled to the brim with officers, many lounging at their leisure, coats thrown over their chairs and glasses filled with wine or cognac.

‘Lord il’Prolais,’ called Lieutenant-General il’Valant. He was across the room, waving Geldrun over. You could tell a lot about an officer, Geldrun had always thought, by whether they addressed you with military rank or social one.

‘Lieutenant-General,’ Geldrun replied, making his way over. He took an offered seat, declined a drink and, once Lord il’Valant had dismissed the other men at the table, began to speak. ‘I regret that you felt it necessary to involve the general. He has enough concerns, and I am already dealing with this one.’

‘I’m not trying to show you up, you understand,’ said il’Valant. ‘But without powder and shot we cannot fight. So, of course I have to notify Count il’Casime. I’ll run it up to Marquis Edgerie, if I must.’

‘The marshal is well aware of our logistical issues, sir.’

‘Oh don’t give me that, il’Prolais. You are holding back supplies. Take Goyn, for example. I am trying to build a stockpile there, to make a play at the Lydei eastern flank, yet the brigade I ordered to hold the town haven’t received anything since they arrived there. The supplies exist, just in the wrong places. How can I make that advance with such awkward and insecure lines of communication?’

Geldrun took a breath and did the difficult thing. The thing he had to do, and hated.

‘You may be correct. I propose we go to Goyn now and inspect the situation. If that particular store has been neglected, I shall do my best to correct it.’

il’Valant smiled broadly. ‘Well now, that is very good of you. Very reasonable. Glad we could work this out. Come then, let us be off.’

***

It was a good road they travelled along. The kind that could support a strong body of men, transporting and supplying them. Geldrun approved of it heartily.

‘Now, il’Prolais,’ il’Valant, riding beside him, began, ‘what I really do not understand is all those reports flying around saying that extra supplies were being sent to Goyn. Was that just some attempt to save face in front of the count?’

Geldrun smiled to hide a scowl. ‘No, Lieutenant-General.’

‘Perhaps, then, you were unaware of how dire the situation truly was?’

‘Perhaps,’ Geldrun agreed, turning his attention back to the surroundings.

A low hill to their north would make a good position for artillery. A commanding view of the terrain. But it lacked a clear line of retreat and, as Geldrun inspected further, some dead ground to the east would protect an advancing formation until they were almost within musket range. Though, if a flanking battery could expose the defilade, it could shore up the position. He made a mental note to show his officers maps of the area and have them take some ranges – it could well be a battlefield as the war progressed.

Goyn was already visible. A small town with open fields to its south and undulating terrain, largely forested, to the north-east. With just one acceptable road, and a couple more inferior ones, from which it could be supplied, Geldrun entirely disagreed with making it the staging point for an attack. Luckily, it had other uses.

An adjutant had gone on ahead, warning the garrisoning brigade of the lieutenant-general’s arrival. They entered the town, the two senior officers at the head of a small group of adjutants and soldiers acting as guards, to a salute of musketry. il’Valant seemed to enjoy it.

He wasn’t a bad commander, Lieutenant-General il’Valant. Brave and decisive in battle. Liked by his soldiers and junior officers. Pompous, yes, but that came with the territory. The man just lacked understanding of the kind of war they were fighting. He made grand plans for aggressive counter attacks that would expose and overstretch their armies. And that, sadly, made him a problem to be skirted around rather than an ally to be entrusted.

The brigade-general in command took them on an impromptu inspection. The man outranked Geldrun but deferred to him. Geldrun hoped that was due to his role as artillery commander and closeness to the general, but knew that his birth most likely also played its role.

After a tour of the men and a few guns, they went to the main stores, in the east of the town, where Geldrun duly agreed that they were undersupplied. In a dire state. An absolute priority for his logistics network.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the brigade-general said to all that. ‘Once we can supply them, I might suggest deploying a cavalry column to the vicinity, to chase off prying Lydesi eyes before you truly build up the town for the attack.’

‘I already sent that order. At Count il’Casime’s request, no less. Only dragoons for now, to help defend, but I shall see about a full brigade of horse to see off the enemy,’ said il’Valant.

‘Then I look forward to seeing them, sir.’

‘They’ve yet to arrive?’ il’Valant asked with a squint to his brow.

‘You’ve been seeing a lot of Lydesi, then, have you?’ Geldrun interrupted.

‘Their light cavalry. A couple of squadrons at least, and we’ve seen them far more these past two days.’

‘Well, let us hope the Fifth Dragoons get their act together and arrive soon,’ il’Valant said.

‘I am sure they shall,’ replied Geldrun.

With it getting so close to dinner, the two senior officers declined an invitation from the brigade-general and prepared to leave, stopping only for a small glass of cognac. As they lingered, Geldrun grew worried. Had he misinterpreted? It was always possible. Still, not every scheme could succeed.

They made their goodbyes and mounted up. And then, finally, the sound he had been waiting for. The telltale crack of muskets and screams of battle.

The brigade-general charged out of his quarters and shouted for a report. A skinny lieutenant ran into view from the south and the direction of the fighting.

‘Sir! Sir! Three squadrons. They broke through the piquets. No-one saw them coming.’

The brigade-general broke out into a flurry of action, sending for his colonels and his horse and reports of the situation. il’Valant wore his shock openly.

‘Sir!’ Another runner came hurrying down the street. ‘One squadron is rounding to the east.’

More than a few men swore and the activity redoubled. To the north-east, hidden in the trees, guns opened up.

‘What’s that?’ il’Valant cried. ‘How did they get artillery there?’

‘I believe those are our guns, sir,’ Geldrun said, letting out a sigh of relief. ‘Ploughing into the flanking squadron. Perhaps we should get a closer look.’

They rode in the direction of the fighting. As the shouts and shots grew closer, smoke appeared. And then the glow of flames.

‘Eynas Reito!’ swore il’Valant. ‘They’ve fired the stores.’

The lieutenant-general drew his sword and galloped into the chaos. At least a hundred Lydesi horsemen were charging through the district, picking off isolated Prolaisians, though many of the enemy had fallen to cannon-fire. il’Valant did his best to bring them together into a fighting force, herding the Lydesi out through massed bayonets. Dozens fell on both sides, while Geldrun watched from the rear.

‘More are coming!’ someone shouted. Geldrun looked, his heart in his mouth, but then relaxed. Reinforcements, yes, but not for the Lydesi.

Blue uniformed Prolaisian dragoons cantered out from the treeline, close to the artillery. The trap was sprung. They dismounted at the edge of the town and fired a volley into the Lydesi horse. Between infantry in the town and dragoons and guns outside of it, the Lydesi broke, losing over half their number as they fled.

The sounds of battle to the south of them lessened, then stopped. The Lydesi had fallen back.

Inside Goyn, someone attempted to organise a firefighting effort. But it wouldn’t work: the stores were lost. Outside the town, the dragoons remounted and entered, cheered by their compatriots. Their commander approached Geldrun and il’Valant.

‘Thank Eynas Reito for you,’ il’Valant said. ‘Report.’

‘Lieutenant-Colonel il’Darsaix, Fifth Dragoons, sir. We saw the attack and intervened when we could.’

‘Fifth Dragoons? Were you not ordered to come straight here? Why ever were you hiding in the trees?’

il’Darsaix glanced to Geldrun, who subtly shook his head.

‘Just reconnoitring, sir. We linked up with the Third Horse Artillery Troop.’

‘il’Prolais, what were your horse artillery doing in the area?’

‘Who could say, sir?’ Geldrun replied. He looked to the burning stores. ‘A shame about that. Would have been worse if it was full. I suppose the enemy must have intercepted those reports that it was in fact full. Still, they will take time to replace.’

‘Yes, it could have been worse.’ il’Valant sounded pensive. ‘And I suppose I won’t be able to move any more troops to the area, at least for a while.’

‘By which point the armies may have moved position,’ said Geldrun. ‘Alas, I’m sure this won’t set back your plans for an attack by too long. But come: it is a victory you have won today. Lydesi squadrons badly mauled and, in return, the loss of a small number of supplies and some of our defenders. May you have joy of it.’

Geldrun turned his horse to hide a grin. He didn’t lie to himself. He knew they would most likely lose this war. But may he be reborn eternal if he made it easy for their enemies. Making his excuses, he left alone. Another scheme required his attention.

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Thank you for reading and, if you enjoyed this story and want to read more, feel more than welcome to subscribe. This story softly continuous the narrative of the Prolaisian-Lydesi front of the Gulf Sea War. That narrative began — and the character of Geldrun was introduced — in this story:

My next post will be my explanation of the early modern English aristocracy, set to go live on Thursday 20th November. Two weeks after that, for my next fiction post, I’ve got three short stories I’m still working on: one about a regicidal conspiracy, one about an old fencing master forced into a duel, and the last being a return to naval fiction. Which one will I finish first? Your guess is as good as mine, but you’ll get to read whatever it is on 4th December.

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Don’t know where to start with my fiction? Here’s a great place to get some direction.

The problem with shrooms is that one day, you get too high. Truly, just higher than high. You ascend above yourself. And further, you go. Further.

And then, perhaps, you glimpse them. Ethereal. Otherworldly. Elfin. And they smile at you – you swear they smile at you. Wave. Beckon. But then you fall back, slowly, drowning under the weight of the air.

Soon you’re trapped once more inside your tiny, limited mind. Your friends are worried – they say you had a bad trip. At one point, you were thrashing around, a danger to them and to yourself. You try to explain, but the words you need don’t exist. And besides, you pretend you imagined them, even to yourself. You ignore the shadows that linger and the soft laughter in your ears.

Until you can’t, that is. Then, you work out a higher dose and sink into your bed in your dark room and the lights come and that is but the first stage of your ascent back to the summit. Higher and higher still. You expand until there is no you. Until that which was you is the rivers and the trees and the clouds and the stars.

Still higher. You find them and, playfully, they hide and you pursue. They look back, encouraging, their features sharper now. Beautiful, you think, though the thought feels not entirely yours. On they go and on you follow. You feel a pulsing and a building. If you had a spine – but you have no spine – it would arch and undulate. If you had toes – but you have no toes – they would curl.

You grasp at them and touch them, if only for a moment, and that moment is ecstasy. It is the little death that prefigures the great one. It is a flame that warms and burns. And on they go but you have reached the climax and can go only down, so down you go. You look at them but they turn their faces and the half-hidden visages are hideous.

Your body, when you are once more safely encased within it, is a mess. The scratches are deep, even in places you cannot reach, and the blood slick. The pain is all that pierces a black melancholy. A coldness; an emptiness. When you hear the little laugh, behind you and inside you, you shiver and an iota of the ecstasy returns.

They’re with you, just out of sight. Infantile, they seem. And ancient, that too. They mock, they encourage, they tease. They are excitement and they are fear. There are moments when you lick your lips in anticipation, until you go chill with dread.

So you avoid the shrooms. Weed doesn’t bring them – sometimes, they even disappear into the haze. Alcohol is safe too. Yet still, they remain with you and everything is numbness compared to the moments you truly shared with them.

Days later, or years, or decades, it doesn’t matter. Eventually, is the point. They don’t care how long it takes. Eventually, you return to your bed and you turn off the lights and you consume more than you ever before have consumed. More, even, than the last time.

Up. Higher and higher and higher and higher. They’re waiting. With hungry mouths and long fingers, they’re waiting. You find them and you weep as the pulsing begins and you are the raging inferno and the little death is not so little anymore.

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Thank you for reading. This is very different from most of what I write but, nonetheless, feel more than welcome to subscribe for my fiction and non-fiction if you haven’t already. Speaking of which, my next regularly scheduled short fiction will be out in a week, Thursday 6th November. Two weeks after that, my next non-fiction will most likely be my explanation of the early modern English aristocracy.

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It’s a lush and loving description of this group of barefoot little weirdos and their idiosyncrasies. But, it has to be said, it’s perhaps not the best introduction to the novel. Okay, put down the pitchforks. Don’t get me wrong, I love the prologue and I think that, in its own time, the novelty of the thing probably helped get readers through it. But modern readers? It’s a tough sell for entirely understandable reasons. You just can’t write a prologue like that today.

Why? Well, there’s a fundamental reason: only the very strangest of people want to read about worldbuilding before having a reason to care about that worldbuilding, like being attached to characters or interested in events that take place in that world. As one of those very strangest of people, this is a truth I can recognise even if it doesn’t apply to me personally.1

But there’s another reason, which is resultant from Tolkien’s success. Like I said, in his own time I’m sure there was a novelty to the idea that helped readers swallow it. In our time? The wave of fantasy that followed on from Tolkien, that tried to imitate Tolkien, overused the prologue almost to death. Everyone and their dog began their book with a lengthy, barely relevant introduction to the world that turned many readers and editors against them on principle.2 These days, there’s a stigma against the prologue which has seen them used less and less, especially from the ‘90s onwards.

So, if that’s the case, why use them? Well, I think there are still amazing examples of prologues done well and would like to use them to illustrate why and how a writer might employ a prologue to elevate their novel. These reasons are interrelated and I’ll just lay them out here, right up top, before we begin: tone, stakes, theme, dramatic irony, direction, and beginnings. What does all that mean? Read on to find out.

What’s a Prologue?

But first, why even call your prologue a prologue? If they’re so maligned, why not just turn chapter 0 into chapter 1? Well, if you can do that, I’d probably encourage you to do so. If you’ve read Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of King’s, he’s on record saying that it originally had two prologues but he decided to just retitle prologue 2 as chapter 1. If you can, great.

But the true prologue doesn’t function as a chapter one. The true prologue reads so differently to the rest of the novel that it doesn’t work as anything other than something explicitly labelled as coming before the novel truly begins. How?

Well the first and most obvious way is by it being a non-narrative encyclopedia entry, as in LOTR. It goes without saying, I hope, that you shouldn’t be writing one of them as your prologue. You need character and events to engage your reader: that kind of prologue just ain’t gonna cut it in the modern market.

So why else? Well, generally today prologues are set at a radically different time to the main plot, or from a completely different never returned to perspective, or both. We’ll get pretentious and call this ‘temporal disunity’ and ‘viewpoint disunity’. It’s that fundamental disunity with the rest of the novel that means we have to split off the prologue and label it as outside of the usual chapter structure.

To look at The Way of King’s again as an interesting example, because it had a chapter 1 that was intended to be a prologue, that chapter 1 (showing the main point-of-view character getting captured months before the rest of the plot) does have temporal disunity with the rest of the novel, which is probably why it was conceived of as a prologue, but is viewpoint congruent. Whereas, the ‘true’ prologue has both a greater level of temporal disunity (set years before the main plot) and has viewpoint disunity (being from the perspective of a character who only gets other viewpoints in other sections outside of the chapter structure, these interstitial parts that function as prologues to the other subdivisions of the novel).

So that’s what fundamentally forces a prologue to be a prologue: a level of temporal and viewpoint disunity great enough to make the prologue stand out as fundamentally discordant if placed in the novel without explicitly marking it out. But why write such a thing?

Tone

Stories take you on a journey. On that journey, the feel of the story change, sometimes quite dramatically. In LOTR, to keep our first example, we start with a birthday party. We end with battles for the fate of the world, Frodo’s corruption and lingering trauma, and the Shire itself being liberated from occupation.

Readers hopefully understand this going in, but as a writer you might want to clue them into exactly what the tone is going to be as things go on. That way, readers will have a better idea of what they’re getting into and if they’re likely to enjoy it. You can thereby avoid a reader who liked the initial tone getting part way through before the tone shifts and they put the book down. Or, vice versa, a reader who wants your eventual tone thinking the book isn’t for them because it starts quite differently.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the prologue that Jackson added to his film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, but I do understand it. We’re going to end the trilogy with battles for the fate of the world, so let’s briefly start with one, while also explaining why the One Ring is so important. It’s not the most elegantly done, in my opinion, but it does perform this fundamental task. It establishes a tone that, though dropped for most of the the first film, clues the viewer in on what they can expect tonally from the story.

The thing about tone is it’s so universal and simultaneously so ephemeral that you can’t not establish tone. It’s just a feature of all writing. Every prologue does this to some extent, but equally a prologue couldn’t possibly be strong enough to justify itself if that was all it did. So, I’ll leave that discussion here and move on to more quantifiable uses for the prologue.

Stakes

Somewhat relatedly, stories also up the stakes as they go on. Again, this is a natural part of storytelling that most readers understand going into it. But, nonetheless, it can be helpful for writers to let readers know exactly what kind of stakes they’ll be aiming for as the story progresses.

In fantasy, you have the classic example of the farm boy who saves the world. Initially, the threat is likely contained to his family or his village and this forces him to leave. But, after leaving, he gets embroiled in a fight to save the world — a much larger threat. This basic setup describes everything from Star Wars to The Wheel of Time.

Let’s focus, therefore, on the prologue in The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan, the first novel in The Wheel of Time. The first few chapters of that novel introduce us to Rand, a farm boy flaming wool-headed shepherd in a small village. We get some indication that things aren’t right, as he catches a glimpse of a Myrddraal. (Jordan’s take on the Nazgul.) Then a wizard turns up. (Except she’s a woman and looks ageless and has Aragon a wandering heir to a throne who’s also the world’s greatest swordsman along for the ride.) Only then do the trolls/orcs Trollocs attack the village, forcing him to flee. Rand and his friends spend most of the book fleeing north until saving the world, at least temporarily, is thrust upon him at the end. And along the way, he’s told that he can do magic but, because he’s a man, doing said magic will inevitably cause him to lose his mind, kill everyone he loves, and destroy the world.

So that’s a big increase in stakes: both in world peril and personal peril to Rand. Perhaps a jarring increase. Except that there’s the prologue. A prologue in which Rand’s previous incarnation is introduced, having already gone mad and killed his family and friends. The big bad of the novel then shows up, renders him briefly lucid, and in that moment of lucidity he uses his magic to destroy the world and himself in his grief, which is why the world is so screwed up in the main timeline of the novel. And it’s obvious why this has to be a prologue: the temporal disunity is on the scale of millennia and the viewpoint disunity comes from a character who is dead but reincarnated as our main viewpoint by the beginning of the main story.

Right from the beginning, then, we have our stakes; stakes that continue throughout the entire series: the threat to Rand’s sanity and the threat to the world at large. Rand’s ultimate fight is always against himself: the fight to stay sane. To defeat the Dark One without losing himself and breaking the world (again). And now, we can read the beginning with half an eye on where the story is going and the kind of problems Rand is going to have to overcome as it unfolds, thanks to the prologue.

Theme

Theme, like tone, is too ephemeral to justify a prologue on its own. And yet, a prologue is a great place to establish theme. Often a stronger place for it than a chapter one, as chapter one has the additional heavy lifting of establishing the main plot and character(s). A prologue, on the other hand, can be whatever thematically relevant excerpt the writer desires.

The master of this in fantasy fiction is, of course, Guy Gavriel Kay. Tigana, for example, is a story about cultural memory. So, of course, the prologue features two characters talking about legacy and memory. That’s not all it does — the prologue sets up so much more — but it is an important part of it, and something that couldn’t really be done as well in that particular novel’s chapter one. Kay does this with all his prologues (The Lions of Al-Rassan has a particularly good one) and they do so much to add to the depth of his novels.

Dramatic Irony

Sometimes you want the reader to know something that the characters don’t. But, in a limited third-person or first-person viewpoint (the modern standards), it’s quite hard to do that. If we experience the world purely through the eye of one, or a limited few, characters, then we cannot really know anything that they don’t.

With a multi-POV third-limited, one viewpoint character can know something that another doesn’t. Yet still, the reader cannot know something that no viewpoint characters knows. Or, at least, not easily. (A reader can, for example, infer complete information based each character’s partial information.)

How then, can dramatic irony be created without moving into an omniscient narrative voice? One way, is by having a prologue with viewpoint disunity, allowing you to show something through their eyes that the main viewpoint characters don’t know.

A great example of this is the prologue to A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, first of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels. At the start of ASOIAF, magic no longer exists, at least as far as the viewpoint characters are concerned. And yet, throughout the novel, they’ll be presented with number of magical phenomena. At the Wall, we have the otherworldly Others and the risen dead known as wights. Over in Essos, there’s blood magic and the hatching of Daenerys’s dragon eggs on Drogo’s funeral pyre. (Um… spoilers?)

Martin clearly wanted to play with the dramatic irony of this: with having the reader be aware that this is a world in which magic is returning, even if no-one in-world seems to know it. Partially, this can be achieved by genre conventions. The characters don’t know that they’re in a fantasy novel, but we know we’re reading one. So, when we hear about magical phenomena, we the readers are more likely to believe it than the characters. Early on, for example, Old Nan tells Bran legends of giants and magic that get dismissed by the characters, but not as easily by the reader.

But he also achieves this through the prologue. If you don’t remember it, or have never read it, it depicts a small patrol of Night’s Watch getting ambushed by Others. One is killed by the Others and rises as a wight to kill a second. The final member of the group escapes. In chapter one, we see that his story is dismissed as the ravings of a coward and he is executed by Ned as a deserter. But we know. And, now all three members of that patrol are dead, only we know.

Direction

Stories can go in infinite directions. For me, that’s one of the most intimidating things about writing them. (And one reason why I heavily outline my novels.) Having let the reader see all the interesting ways in which a story might unfold, what could be worse for a writer than picking one the reader isn’t interested in? Than leaving the reader with a yearning for the story you didn’t tell, and a disappointment with the one you did.

Our character comes to a fork in the road. On one side, the Dragonpeak Mountains. On the other, the Blighted Forest. Those mountains sure sound cool, I wonder if the writer will… oh what’s that? We’re off to the forest? But my mountains!

Ah, but what’s that? We started our story with a prologue. It’s from the perspective of the Mentor, now long dead of course, facing off against the Dark Lord in the Blighted Forest. What’s more, now we know that hidden deep in the forest the Mentor hid the only artifact strong enough to defeat the Dark Lord.

Take us back to the crossroads. Now I’m screaming at the page: GO TO THE FOREST! Get those stupid mountains out of here, I want the forest. And when the character inevitably chooses the forest, it’s both expected (why set it up if we’re not going to go there?, Chekhov asks) and what the reader wants.

I hope you take my point. Rarely will it be as cut-and-dry as that, but a story is a succession of crossroads and one of the ways readers become excited by where the story is going is by giving them a little glimpse of the right path and how interesting that particular journey will be. A prologue is great for that.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying readers don’t like being surprised by the direction of a story. They do… within limits. And, one of the big differences in how a writer experiences their story compared to a reader is that a writer knows where it’s going. Early readers are great for identifying other directions a writer might not even realise they had suggested the story might go in. And, if the story not going in that direction starts becoming a distraction for readers, a prologue can be useful for signposting roughly where we’re aiming to go.

Beginnings

Personally, I can’t stand the idea that you’ve got one line to hook your reader so that better be the hookiest damn line to ever hook a hook hook. Hook.

I’ve read so many stories recently that start with a line clearly designed to be the most intriguing, exciting, crazy thing I’ve ever read. And then line two is almost entirely disconnected and has to do the actual job of establishing the story.

So, I’m not saying writers should indulge in that. But, that’s also not to say that those first few lines aren’t important. They absolutely are. If a writer can get a killer first line, or start with some interesting event, then obviously that will be to a story’s advantage. And, often, it’s easier to do that with a prologue.

Again, to further drive the point home, this can so easily be absolutely awful advice. Okay, thinks the novice writer, I’ll start in the middle of a big battle. It’ll be really cool! People will die, fireballs will fly. And then we will, of course, move on to a borderline encyclopedia entry in chapter one, and of course the prologue will never end up being relevant even in the slightest. But the reader will just be so hooked by my prologue that they’ll power on through it!

I’m caveating this so much because of just how often I have seen this done awfully. But, nonetheless, cautiously, it can be a useful tool when it isn’t abused. Don’t use an interesting prologue as an excuse to keep in a bad chapter one. But do use an interesting prologue to enhance an interesting chapter one.

Doing it All

All writing should accomplish more than one thing; it’s a craft all about doing more with less. A prologue is, of course, no different and, as such, should not be focused on just one of these.

Let’s go back to the prologue from A Game of Thrones, one of the great prologues of fantasy fiction. Yes, it establishes dramatic irony. But it does so much more, too. There’s narrative direction, in that it ensures that we won’t be taken off guard when the story takes a magical turn. There’s stakes, as now we know that the world is threatened by a race of ice monsters and their undead army. It’s a fascinating and exciting beginning — the eerie approach to an abandoned camp, thrilling duel against Others, and horror as a dead warrior rises to kill his fellow — and one that doesn’t just exist to mask a bad chapter one. (Instead, it enhances chapter one, which wouldn’t work anywhere near as well without it.) And there’s tone — oh is there tone!

Finally, of course, there’s theme. Flawed people grasping at heroism in the face of a cruel world is something about the books that’s always fascinated me, (even if it’s so often misinterpreted as ‘nihilism’) and it’s right there at the beginning. An untested knight, new to the Watch, arrogantly superior, and only in charge because of aristocratic nepotism is obviously not a clear cut hero. Yet, when faced with certain death at the hands of an enemy he doesn’t understand and can hardly believe truly exists, what does he do?

Ser Waymar met him bravely. “Dance with me then.” He lifted his sword high over his head, defiant.

Chills and a lump in my throat, every time.

And the thematic elements of the prologue extend into chapter one, where Ned executes the only survivor of this confrontation. Ned is a true hero. Brave, just, honourable. Yet, through an inability to understand the world as it truly is and an unwillingness to bend to pragmatism in service to a higher ideal, he will fail. His first failure, setting up his later greater ones, is here: where he cannot believe the story of the Others and wights, and executes a man who should have lived.

That, my friends, is a prologue.

An Example

I have written two novels. My first, now comfortably trunked, did not have a prologue. My second, still undergoing revisions, was not originally conceived with one, but then I changed my mind.

The big thing I wanted to create was dramatic irony. The story is primarily a political intrigue and, for much of it, is concerned with the question of what happened to a particular man — the man who set the plot in motion (by killing a king in a duel) and who’s been missing these past two years. The answer is he’s dead and I wanted the reader to already know that, so I wrote a prologue from his perspective, showing the regicidal duel and ending with his betrayal and murder, while keeping hidden who exactly killed him.

The prologue, therefore, gave me that dramatic irony. But I then realised how much more I could do with it. The book starts in one country, but most of the action takes place in a completely different country. So, the prologue is set there. That way, the reader knows to expect that development. (In particular because the character initially resists going there, instead having another plan, and I didn’t want the reader to be disappointed when he was forced towards that country.) Direction, tick.

Chapter one does have life-and-death stakes (the main character almost dies in his own duel), but I wanted to drive them home. Having the viewpoint character get murdered at the end of the prologue achieved that goal. Stakes, tick.

I like the first line of chapter one, describing the taste of wine at a formal dinner. The viewpoint character’s relationship to wine and what it represents to him is important to the book. And within a few hundred words, our character is committed to a duel. The rest of the chapter is the lead up to and resolution of that duel. So, I don’t think I have a weak beginning. But with the prologue, I could get a much stronger first line and initial scene. Plus I got to transition from blood on of the ground in the last line of the prologue to that visual of drinking red wine in the first line of chapter one. Original? Hardly. But striking? I hope so. Beginnings, tick.

Tone and theme? Harder to explain, (maybe you noticed that the prologue and chapter one both include duels) but let’s just say tick and tick.

Overall, the prologue is only a thousand words but, at this point, I couldn’t imagine the novel without it.

A Conclusion

Novels, even fantasy novels, do not need prologues. That was the real problem with the abundance of prologues in previous decades: they were often superfluous. Only included out of a sense of genre convention.

But they are still incredibly useful and interesting. Like every part of this craft, they are a tool that can be used for the good of a story or can weaken it.

Yet still, there are prologues that can only be prologues — because of temporal and/or viewpoint disunity — and things that prologues can do better than any chapter one. And, for that reason, they are a tool (fantasy) writers should keep in their toolbox, rather than merely abandoning due to their poor reputation in the modern market.

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Thank you for reading. You can subscribe for more like this as well as my own fiction. My next short story will be up on 6th November and will either be I’ll See to it, Sir, a continuation of my Gulf Sea War stories or The Assassination of Malik Fakir XII, about a regicidal conspiracy. (What can I say, I just like regicidal conspiracies.) My next non-fiction, released 20th November, should be my explanation of the early modern English aristocracy. And I’m working on something a little different I might release during one of my off weeks in the next month.