In Burke and the Pimpernel Affair, Burke visits the Empress Josephine at her home at Malmaison. Until I started researching the story, I had no idea that Malmaison still existed and is a short bus ride from the centre of Paris. Back then, I couldn’t go to see it because of covid. Fortunately, there is an excellent virtual tour available online but I really wanted to see the place for myself and last month I was finally able to visit.
It’s a beautiful house, lovingly restored to show what it was like when Josephine lived there.
This was her bedroom and the bed where she died in May 1814. It’s rather splendid.
She actually had another, more liveable, bedroom for regular use but this one (designed in 1812 and restored by Napoleon III) was her “formal” bedroom. I wish I had seen it before I wrote the book because I’ve created an imaginary bedroom on the ground floor and this one would have been much more fun.
Visiting Malmaison gives you a strong idea of what Josephine was like. I enjoyed the billiards room.
Billiards rooms always seem a very masculine place (often explicitly so in English stately homes) but the billiards room at Malmaison was just across the hall from the dining room and apparently Josphine enjoyed a game of billiards after dinner.
Although Malmaison was her personal property, Napoleon spent a lot of time there and clearly had a hand in a lot of the décor. There is a recurring tent motif, with walls covered in fabric. The Emperor wanted to feel that he was out campaigning even when he was quietly at home with his wife. This was particularly obvious in the council chamber where he would often meet with his ministers.
Napoleon was a voracious reader — he even had a travelling library in the coach he took on campaign — and leading off the council chamber was a large library with a hidden staircase that led directly to his first floor apartment.
There are an awful lot paintings of Josephine on display in Malmaison. I notice her feet peeking out from under some of her dresses. I think she might have been especially proud of her feet which, judging from some shoes on display, were particularly small and narrow.
She was fond of shoes, buying an immense number. She spent out on dresses, too, though probably not very many like this one.
Josephine is buried with her children in a church nearby.
It’s such a shame that Ridley Scott’s terrible film of Napoleon’s life did not make more of Josephine. At one point, Napoleon appointed her Regent of France and she seems to have been a remarkable woman. It was a great pleasure to visit her home.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
If you want to explore more of the places Burke visited in the book, have a look at last week’s blog post: In Paris with James Burke.
I really enjoyed writing Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. It’s a straightforward spy story with more than a nod to Baroness Orczy’s hero, freeing French prisoners from Paris gaols.
Much of the story revolves round the Conciergerie which was the main prison during the Terror and which still housed prisoners under Napoleon. I’d often seen the building from outside without knowing what it was and I looked forward to visiting it while I was working on the book. Then came covid and visits to Paris were postponed indefinitely. Even when the city was open to tourists again, buildings like the Conciergerie remained closed and my research all had to be done online. Now I have finally made it over to France to see the places I had written about. It was great fun!
This is the Conciergerie.
It used to combine court buildings and a prison. The courts are still there but most of the cells have been lost in the extensive remodelling the place went through in the 19th century. Some remain as museum pieces.
The palace complex (the Conciergerie was originally a royal palace) includes the chapel of Sainte Chapelle. At the time Burke was there, it was used as a library. Now it has been restored as an astonishingly beautiful church.
The main entrance to the building was up a grand flight of steps which a wounded Burke flees down after the escape has not entirely gone to plan. Here it is.
Sadly, there was no car waiting to whisk him away.
It was lovely to visit the real site of Burke’s fictitious adventures. I went to Malmaison as well, but that will have to wait till next week.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
It’s late in the day to be posting my Friday offering, but I’ve got an excuse. This was earlier today.
It’s been an exciting few days, following in Burke’s footsteps from Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. There’ll be a long post about it next week, but right now I’m tired and off to bed. Enjoy your weekend!
Last week Tales of Empire was available free on Amazon. I hope you got a copy. If you didn’t, it will set you back a whole 99p this week.
I’m never sure about whether free promotions really boost sales of books, but in this case book sales aren’t the important thing. After all, at 99p the four authors whose stories make up Tales of Empire are never going to become rich. (If we are ever all in the same place, our profits might buy the coffees.) The whole reason for producing Tales of Empire was introduce new writers in the hope that you will go on to read their books.
My contribution, The Tiger Hunt, is a spin-off story from the world of The White Rajah and I hope that it will make you want to learn more about James Brooke and his life as the White Rajah.
He was a fascinating man: a merchant-adventurer who bought a ship, ostensibly to trade in the South China Seas but really in the hope of extending British influence in an area dominated by the Dutch. He extended British influence even more than he had planned, involving himself so thoroughly in the politics of the local Malay rulers that he ended up ruling his own country: Sarawak in Borneo.
It’s a tale of adventure with battles and plots and midnight raids, but it’s also a more serious story about colonialism and how, even when seeking to do the best for the natives he thought of as “his people” the sudden intervention of Europeans from an alien culture had some unhappy unintended consequences.
James Brooke did an enormous amount of good in Sarawak and even today some people look back on the time of the White Rajahs as a Golden Age. But when his rule was threatened he could be utterly ruthless.
Evil white colonialist or a good man who spent most of his life (and practically all of his fortune) building a peaceful and prosperous society where there had been little but poverty and war?
I’m biased: I think Brooke was a hero, albeit a flawed one. However, I have tried to be even-handed in the telling of his story. The story is told from the point of view of Brooke’s interpreter, John Williamson, who is also the narrator of The Tiger Hunt He is caught up in the events but still sees them as, to an extent, an outsider. He is so shocked by the massacre that he leaves Brooke and Sarawak, convinced that what had happened was wrong.
I hope that you might read the book and make your own decision. It’s available on Kindle for just £3.99. Click HERE for the Amazon site. You can also buy it in paperback.
Last year I posted a piece about hill forts which was inspired by Ailish Sinclair’s rather wonderful book, Sisters at the Edge of the World. The story featured a vitrified hill fort. That’s a hill fort where stonework has turned to glass, probably because of intense heat. Vitrification is definitely a real thing: the vitrification of sand under campfires may well be how glass was initially discovered. And it has certainly happened in Scotland. Ailish Sinclair has blogged about Cullykhan, near Aberdeen: a hill fort on a coastal promontory where vitrified stone has been discovered.
I was confused, because the hill forts I’ve seen look like earthen parapets with no sign of any stone. Photos of Cullykhan show no sign of walls nowadays, but excavation discloses stone walls inside the earth barriers, almost as if the stone served as a starting point for the earth walls.
Did the Scots build their hill forts differently from the English or are English forts also based on stone walls?
Hill forts are generally something of a mystery. Were they military strongpoints where Iron Age tribes retreated in times of war? Or were they defences around permanent settlements? Certainly some did feature in battles with the Romans when they invaded these islands and many are well situated for defence on natural high points with clear views. This is less obviously the case with others. Similarly, some show evidence that they were permanent settlements, while others seem to have been used only in times of unrest.
My post looked at some of the hill forts I’ve visited and I’m updating it now to include Uffington Castle, which I went to see in March.
Uffington Castle
Uffington Castle is an Iron Age hill fort that sits just above the famous White Horse In Oxfordshire.
The White Horse (NASA)
Although it’s generally referred to as an Iron Age fort, there was probably at least some sort of structure on this site from the Bronze Age, around 700 or 800 years BCE. This means that Uffington Castle and the White Horse may well date back to the same period. It’s a particularly large example of a hill fort, measuring around 220 metres by 160 metres. When I visited, I thought it was a very regular shape but those who have surveyed it describe it as D shaped. It certainly looks more like what I think of as a fort than do many of the others described below. Here’s a photo of one corner, looking just like the corner of fortifications for the next couple of thousand years.
In its heyday, the bank probably incorporated a timber palisade and may well have been faced with stones. The whole thing was surrounded by a V shaped ditch with another, outer, bank beyond it.
The ditch
It was a solid defensive structure. Excavations identify a gatehouse at the main entrance with banks extending around it to provide additional defence.
There is evidence that people lived up there. The site may have been abandoned and resettled a few hundred years later around the third century CE. It doesn’t ever seem to have been a particularly large settlement, though, so it may have been lived in mostly at times of war. Maybe that’s why it seems to have been abandoned during the Roman era, when this area had significant Romano-British settlement and benefited from the famous ‘Pax Romana’.
The British Camp
The first hill fort to make an impression on me was years ago on a visit to the Malverns. The British Camp (that’s its name) is supposed to be the largest in the country and is certainly well positioned for defence. It’s difficult to catch the scale of it in a photo, with concentric earthworks surrounding 44 acres. Here’s a view from one of the earthworks near the centre.
The British Camp dates from around 3,500 years ago but it was rapidly expanded around 400 BC. It seems to have been the site of a permanent settlement with about 4,000 inhabitants at its height.
Dinas Dinlle
This hill fort, Dinas Dinlle, in north-west Wales, is, like Cullykhan, on the coast. Part of it has been eroded by the sea. As at Cullykhan, there is evidence of stony material under some of the ramparts, but many of the features of the fort seem to have occurred naturally. Perhaps Iron Age settlers were attracted by the natural features and then steepened the slopes and built up the banks.
The inner bank at Dinas Dinnle
About a third of Dinas Dinnle has been lost to the sea
We do know something about life there because recent excavations (after our visit) have revealed a monumental stone-built roundhouse, some 13 metres in diameter with stone walls almost 2.5 metres thick. The roundhouse can’t be dated precisely but the presence of Roman pottery nearby suggests around 2,000 years ago.
Ringsbury Camp
Nearer to home is Ringsbury Camp, just north of Swindon. Our son lives in Purton and the camp is an easy walk from his house. Surrounded by woodland, it does not look particularly impressive, but is sited on a natural rise and would have made a strong defensive position.
The inner banks at RingsburyThe rising ground to the west of the fort
Ringsbury did incorporate stone into its walls. The banks are made from limestone rubble, not that any of it is visible today. The stone is not local to the area, but had been transported from further afield.
Historians think that Ringsbury did not house a permanent settlement, but was a defensive position in times of unrest.
Bristol
Once you start noticing hill forts, they seem to be everywhere. On our recent trip to Bristol we were able to explore two. There used to be three in the area around the Clifton Bridge, but one has been lost with the development of the area around the western end of the bridge. One of the others is almost invisible amongst the trees on the edge of a local public park (Clifton Down). The third, Stokeleigh Camp on National Trust land above the bridge, is easy to pass by without noticing but, once spotted, is an impressive size.
Ditch at Stokeleigh CampRampart at Stokeleigh Camp
Stokeleigh Camp was originally settled during the late-pre Roman period when the soil was cleared and the ground levelled. Habitation continued without a substantial break until the middle of the 1st century AD.
Conclusion
So there we are: based on the limited number of sites I’ve seen, some hill forts used stone in their construction while others did not. Some were the site of permanent settlements which may have included substantial buildings, while others seem to have been essentially defensive structures, used only in emergencies. They may be sited on high ground or on the coast or by a river, possibly guarding a ford (as in Bristol).
We seem to know very little about hill forts. As they were built in pre-Roman times they are literally prehistoric, with no written records of how they were built or used. There seems to have been a flurry of research recently, but many of the sites have not been properly excavated. Perhaps we have accepted the Roman notion that the hill forts were built by barbarians whose lives and customs were of no importance. Whatever the reason, they remain largely a mystery but they are worth looking out for.
