I was at the National Army Museum recently for a lecture on the life of the rather splendidly named Shadrack (or Shadrach) Byfield. He was a private soldier in the War of 1812 and he wrote a memoir of his life in the army. Unusually for the period, he wrote it himself, rather than having it written for him by one of his officers. The lecture was more about his life after leaving the army rather than the memoir itself, which should make interesting reading. He spent years arguing about the pension he should have received and did eventually get compensation for the loss of his arm during the war. It was a fascinating view of how soldiers returned to civilian life.
After the lecture I explored what I could find on the War of 1812. To be honest, there wasn’t much, but I’ve not found anything on previous visits, so I was happy to turn up an “Indian contract pistol”. Burke and the War of 1812 has Burke supplying native Americans with muskets, ostensibly for hunting but, in reality, so that they can attack American settlers. This was ahead of the outbreak of war when the British were anxious not to be seen as arming the natives. By 1814, we were openly arming the tribes that were, by then, actively fighting with us, and this is an example of a weapon specifically intended for this. There was clearly no pretence that this was a hunting weapon.
An important character in Burke and the War of 1812 is the Shawnee war chief, Tecumseh, so I was excited to find his powder horn on display. Tecumseh was an important British ally, killed by the Americans in 1813.
BURKE AND THE WAR OF 1812
Burke and the War of 1812 is the latest of the series of books about James Burke, a real-life spy for the British, though most of his adventures in my books are made up. I sent him to North America because someone who enjoys the books kept on telling me what a great background the War of 1812 would provide and he was right. It’s a story that sees Burke negotiating with native tribes to forge alliances ahead of the war, spying in Washington to discover American plans and, at the climax, joining the attack on Detroit that ended up with the town in British hands.
There’s more on Substack
I’m cutting back on this blog because I am moving to Substack. My Substack posts include everything I post here plus some different stuff. This week, there’s an article on Napoleon’s return to France in 1815 and a very beautiful church in London that’s easily overlooked.
Readership of my blog (and, I suspect, all blogs) is fading away, while Substack seems flourishing. This week on Substack, I’m reposting an old post about Napoleon’s escape from Elba, a note on Georgian furniture, a poll on what readers want to see and a pretty picture to round it all off. I’m finding it easier to use than WordPress (that’s here) and more fun. I will still cross-post, but not every week and I’ll probably gradually fade away here. Apart from anything else, maintaining this site costs me money and I don’t feel it generates enough enthusiasm from me or my readers to justify it.
This is a shorter version of a piece about tango that I’ve just put on Substack. Substack just seems more fun and, from a simple mechanics point of view, much easier to post on. I recommend you go there. But, if you don’t want to, here’s the edited version (without video and other fun bits).
There are several different styles of tango, but at a traditional milonga people usually only dance three. One is just called tango (and we’re talking Argentine tango here, not ballroom tango, which I could write a whole different post on). The other two (to add to the confusion) are also tangos, but use different music: vals and milonga.
At social dances (milongas), music is played in sets of three or four songs (called tandas), separated by some non-tango music (called the cortina) while people sort themselves out for the next set. In traditional milongas, you play two tango tandas, then a vals tanda, then two more sets of tangos, and then (just to confuse everyone again) a milonga tanda.
Most people will recognise tango music when they hear it. I can’t put in examples (copyright issues) but there is a link to one well-known song (and also one of the best movie tango scenes) HERE.
‘Vals’ is just the Spanish for ‘waltz’ and is music in waltz time. It’s usually danced faster than a regular tango and it has a very distinct ‘feel’ but most people who tango will also dance tango vals.
Milonga is different. It’s probably the oldest, simplest kind of tango and has distinctively syncopated beat. There’s a link HERE. Although it’s simple, the steps are very fast and it makes a lot of people nervous.
EASIER DONE THAN SAID
Tango is not really that complicated. It started as a dance for working people in South America who wanted to relax at the end of a long day and the music grew from the different styles of music that he various immigrant communities brought with them. It has spread throughout the world as a joyous way for people to come together in dance. As it has spread, so it has grown and developed, so that many people will not be dancing in the formal milonga patterns of yesteryear. New styles have developed with new and exciting music. Underlying it all, though, remain the three basic types of music — tango, vals, and milonga — and the different styles of dance that go with them.
TANGO IN MY BOOKS
There is no tango in my historical fiction, because the dance didn’t develop until the late 19th century I have written some Urban Fantasies, though, and these feature a vampire who loves tango. I’ve always thought tango would appeal to the Undead because it exists largely in a nocturnal world. Perhaps that explains the elaborate cemeteries in Buenos Aires.
Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires
My vampire is living (or undead) in London where Brompton Cemetery has to stand in for Recoleta, but he dances an awful lot of tango, which is quite central to the story.
Something Wicked has been described as “a cleverly-conceived, well-written and excellently plotted novel about murder, policing, vampires, and Tango”. It was certainly fun to write and I hope you find it fun to read. You can buy it on Amazon in paperback (£7.99) or on Kindle (£2.99).
When Napoleon accepted his defeat in April 1814, he accepted also the idea that he would go into exile. Exile was to me made a less onerous punishment because the French government promised to pay him six million francs a year as his pension.
It was suggested that he might go to Corfu or Corsica, the country where he was born. However he chose Elba, an island between Corsica and Italy.
Enfola Beach, Elba. Photo: Michael Joachim Lucke
Besides his pension he had been promised that he would retain the status of a sovereign, so the Emperor of France became the absolute ruler of this island of about 85 square miles, and a few smaller islands around it. As the ruler, he was entitled to his own army, although, compared to the armies he had once led, it was little more than an honour guard, with around 700 men.
At first, Napoleon seemed reconciled to exile. The pension, he had observed, was “a great deal for a soldier as I am”. He was to be joined by his sister, Pauline, who was too ill to travel with him when he first left France, and he expected his mother, his wife and his son to move to Elba later.
He threw himself enthusiastically into public works: building new roads, improving the quality of the streets, and making plans for the development of the iron mines that were the country’s main industry. To the irritation of the Allied powers, he started to recruit new soldiers from Italy. Arguably, as the recognised ruler of Elba, he had a perfect right to do this. In any case, he pointed out that with Moorish pirates regularly operating in the area he had a duty to maintain an army large enough to garrison the defences of Elba and its surrounding islands.
Flag designed by Napoleon for Elba
Princess Pauline did not arrive until June, but her appearance at Elba substantially improved social life on the island with balls, concerts, and theatrical performances enlivening the place. What had originally been a guardhouse to the mansion that Napoleon had made his home was turned into a theatre, where plays were performed by the princess herself, her ladies and the officers of the guard.
Whether the 700 soldiers of Napoleon’s private army were amused by the new social opportunities we do not know, but it is certain that they were bored and Napoleon himself referred to them affectionately as his “grumblers”. The soldiers who had accompanied Napoleon to Elba were all volunteers – indeed, some officers had resigned their commissions and enlisted in the ranks so that they could go into exile with their leader. They constituted some of his most loyal troops, many of them battle hardened. Napoleon regularly reviewed them and insisted that they continue to train. Artillery enthusiast that he was, he had them practising regularly with both regular round shot and heated shot. Despite this, though, there is no doubt that they found life on Elba, though comfortable, profoundly dull.
Napoleon’s enthusiasm for his new realm gradually waned. To his dismay, the French government reneged on the promise of a pension and the cost of maintaining his court and his army vastly exceeded the revenue that could be extracted from Elba’s iron mining and its other limited revenue-raising opportunities. Servants were let go, building plans were abandoned and Napoleon, from keeping himself busy inspecting his projects around the island, began to sulk around the house, putting on weight.
Napoleon on Elba
The arrival of his mother, to whom he was devoted, improved his mood, but he was genuinely distressed when it became clear that his wife and son were not to join him. His wife was Marie Louise (who had replaced Josephine in 1810). She was the daughter of Emperor Francis II of Austria and the Austrian government was unhappy with the idea of her and her son forming the focus of Napoleon’s new court. She was persuaded not to join him and Napoleon seems to have accepted this, but he could not come to terms with the idea that he would never again see his son.
The shortages of money and the absence of his son soured his mood. He regularly received news of the situation in France from his supporters there as well as studying the French and British newspapers. By the spring of 1815, he was convinced that there were plans to force him from Elba – plans which he said he would resist by force. “Avant cela il faut faire une brèche dans mes fortifications, et nous verrons.” He believed that the Allies might send him to St Helena and subsequent events suggest that this may have been in their minds.
Faced with what Napoleon saw as a threat to his future on Elba, the refusal of the French to pay his pension or the Austrians to allow his son to visit the island, he looked at the disenchantment of the French with their restored monarchy and decided that he would be better off returning to Paris.
Napoleon’s brief experiment with ruling a small island in the Mediterranean was coming to an end and the events that would lead to Waterloo were being set in motion.
An aside on that palindrome
Napoleon never created the famous palindrome, ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba.’ The first recorded use of it is from 1848, long after Napoleon’s death. It appears in an American publication, Gazette of the Union, where it is credited to an anonymous Baltimore author, known only as JTR.
Further reading
For a detailed account of Napoleon’s time on Elba see The Island Empire by the anonymous ‘author of Blondelle’, published by T Bosworth in 1855 and available in Google Books.
A shorter summary is available in Life and Campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte translated from the French of M A Arnault and CLF Panckoucke, published by Philips Samsung and Company of Boston in 1857 and also available in Google Books.
For a detailed discussion of the origin of the palindrome, see Quote Investigator: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/15/saw-elba/
A word from our sponsor
Napoleon was right to believe that there were many people in France who hoped for, and in some cases actively worked for, his return. Amongst other plots, there was one to assassinate Wellington, who was representing British interests in Paris. This period is the background to the beginning of Burke at Waterloo.
Of course, Napoleon did leave Elba and eventually met the British at Waterloo were James Burke played a small, but crucial, role. [Spoiler alert: Napoleon lost.]
One of the fun things about writing historical fiction is the details of language that turn up. Guessing the dates that words or phrases were in use is tricky. I recommend that historical writers get a copy of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives the earliest recorded use of words in their context. It was very useful when an editor objected to ‘garbage’ in the late 18th century because it seemed too modern. I was referring to bodies after the Battle of the Nile floating ‘like garbage’ in the Mediterranean (in Burke and the Bedouin). I had just thought it sounded right, but I had to check. It turns out that the word was originally used of offal and waste thrown out by butchers, so garbage was exactly the correct word – though it was mainly a happy guess.
This comes to mind because I was recently writing about the early 19th century and I referred to soldiers’ gear, which a reader said they thought was too modern. I had the feeling I had heard of ‘gear’ being used right back to knights in armour and it turns out I was right. The OED gives me ‘On ich wulle mid mine gære’ from 1305 when it often referred to ‘warlike accoutrements’. I thought the modern equivalent would be ‘kit’ but here I was mistaken in the other direction. The word was recorded, again in a military context, as early as 1785: ‘The kit is likewise the whole of a soldier’s necessaries, the contents of his knapsack.’
Napoleonic re-enactor with his kit
Phrases bring problems too and the OED won’t help here. I remember reading that an author had been criticised for referring to people in the early 20th century as ‘hanging out’ with each other, but research revealed that this was definitely a term used at the time.
EDIT: And just a few days after writing this, I have come across this from a vicar in 1858 (thanks to Eva Chatterji’s excellent blog): “Felt very Mondayish today; so I took a holiday, and went to some pony races…”
It’s because of things like this that the simplest paragraph in a historical novel can lead to ridiculous amounts of research. I’m not sure that readers really appreciate it, but if you don’t like checking that sort of thing, then writing historical novels is probably not for you.
