Between 1605, when an English Catholic conspiracy notoriously failed to blow up King James I, and 1649, when the Puritan revolution executed his son, Charles, England made a remarkable transition from the Renaissance world of William Shakespeare to the more modern world of Milton, Hobbes and Newton. These fateful decades of English history are less celebrated than the Elizabethan glories that went before or the Restoration revels that came after, but remain a hinge moment that deserves closer scrutiny. This is one motivation for A Stain in the Blood, an innovative attempt to recover lost time, and re-examine a neglected period, specifically the succession of Charles I to his father’s troubled isle, a kingdom whose search for a settlement ended in civil war.
The emblematic figure on whom Joe Moshenska focuses to explore this story is a great English amateur, Sir Kenelm Digby, a central figure in mid-Jacobean London. Digby, who loved to cook, was close to Charles, and mixed up with the scientists, adventurers, writers and artists of the age in a way that was still, vanishingly, possible in the 1630s. As well as being a man of his time, Digby took inspiration from outstanding Elizabethans such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney, men who risked all at the crossroads of high politics and great ideas, and paid for it with their lives.
As a now forgotten man of affairs, Digby suits Moshenska’s purposes very well: he is indeed an apt prism through which to consider the failure of Charles’s reign and the evolving Jacobean crisis. The problem is that he is far too rich and vivid in personality to be just an attendant lord subordinate to the historian’s broader intentions. Is this, the reader asks, a ramped-up thesis in search of an editor, or a rip-roaring historical saga, or a bit of both? Perhaps it doesn’t matter that this faultline is never fully bridged. Sir Kenelm Digby’s story is more than usually compelling. Here was a young man cursed by some terrible deaths in the family, with a lot of ghosts to lay, and troubled by a gruesome inheritance.
The “stain in the blood” that dominated Digby’s formative years was his father’s execution as a co-conspirator in the gunpowder plot of 1605, whose bitter memory overshadowed the political life of the nation for decades. “Remember, remember,” begins the famous doggerel. At times, it seemed as if the English could never forget the plot that failed.
Digby never could. In 1627, aged just 24, he commissioned a fleet in the spirit of Raleigh, and set sail on a bizarre quest: to become a quasi-Elizabethan hero, and purge his family’s reputation. This is not all; far from it. Digby’s Mediterranean adventures were further complicated by his deeply romantic nature. He had secretly married his childhood sweetheart, Venetia Stanley, and was tormented by his absence from the family home.
And now, in the strangest twist of all, obsessed with the vicissitudes of his love for Venetia, Digby the would-be pirate becomes Digby the proto-novelist. On board his flagship the Eagle, he began to compose a manuscript entitled Loose Fantasies in which, through the semi-autobiographical tale of “Theagenes” (himself) and “Stelliana” (Venetia), he could begin to make sense of his malign fate.
A mirror to his hero’s romantic ambitions, Moshenska seems to be in conflict about what voice and viewpoint to adopt. A Stain in the Blood opens with a vividly imagined portrait of Digby in old age, replete with an interior narrative, an arresting device that allows the historian periodically to masquerade as a novelist. For instance, when our hero contemplates a stretch of the Spanish coast from the deck of the Eagle, we are told that “his mind took him back”, etc. This shape-shifting approach certainly exploits the riches of Digby’s story. But it distorts Moshenska the historian’s focus on “one of the most eventful and dizzyingly transformative periods in the history of England”.
Meanwhile, Digby’s tale now turns darker and more poignant still. Soon after our hero’s return from his adventures, his wife dies inexplicably. (Moshenska: “Memories of the beginnings of their love flooded back into his mind.”) More prosaically, Digby spent the rest of his life mourning another terrible loss.
A Stain in the Blood is a history full of enticing fictions, centred on a strange and solitary figure whose life, a doomed quest for liberating reinvention, was both tragic and unfulfilled. In some ways as heroic as Digby himself, Moshenska has defied the tyranny of genre, and made his own absorbing narrative from which, perhaps, others will in due course derive either a full-blown film script, or possibly a more conventional historical monograph.
A Stain in the Blood is published by William Heinemann (£20). Click here to order a copy for £16
