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A Connecticut Vampire in King Arthur’s Court by Ian Hall

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Royal Tudor Politics: Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth

Henry VIII and his modern day counterpart from HBO's The Tudors



Continuing a series of  posts inspired by background research for my Connecticut Vampire series, first volume scheduled for release early fall 2013...

It is easy to be overly simplistic when it comes to analyzing royal politics in the Tudor era. Yes, perhaps King Henry VIII had so many wives because he was a misogynist bastard.
Yes, perhaps King Henry had so many wives because he needed a male heir to reign after him.
Both statements have some historical merit but as with all politics, the truth lies far deeper.

King Henry had heard from his own father’s lips how the civil war (the "War of the Roses") had shattered the peace of England for decades. He realized, that to succeed himself, he needed a stable monarch; a male heir.  England had never had a lone queen, and when his first two children to survive infancy turned out to be female, he began to panic. With the benefit of hindsight we see that Henry had foundation in all his fears, yet in an effort to avert civil war, he’d inadvertently provided the necessary conditions for another to begin. In his quest for a male heir and the religious changes he’d been ‘forced’ into, Henry had split the country in two. Half of the English people hankered after the old comforts of Catholicism, half reveled in the new freedoms of Protestantism.

Even after his death, fate dealt Henry VIII a cruel twist.  His male heir Edward never survived to his eighteenth birthday and his full coronation. He only ruled for a sickly four years, used by the regent nobles as a piece on a chess board. On Edward’s dying bed, the boy was persuaded to declare a cousin, Protestant Lady Jane Grey, to be his heir. The ambitious move disinherited both Catholic Mary and 'illegitimate' Elizabeth, his elder sisters , but Jane and her backers couldn't muster the support to keep her dubious claim to the throne viable. Lady Jane is known as "the Nine Days Queen" due to the brevity of her reign in July of 1553 and she was executed less than a year later at the tender age of 17.

Lady Jane Grey was played by Helena Bonham Carter in the 1986 film Lady Jane

When Queen Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, ascended the throne she was supported by the biggest military faction, and the biggest proportion of nobles. She was already a Princess, cruelly treated by both Henry and his son Edward; the Catholic half of England embraced her, and she came to power bloodlessly. It was now time for "Bloody Mary" to prove as ruthless and stubborn as her father.

Mary wanted to turn England back to a Catholic nation, and required a Catholic heir, so she married King Phillip of Spain. Mary also wanted rid of pesky Protestant ministers, so she arrested them, and had them burnt at the stake; not the nicest way to go, trust me.


So the pendulum swings and popular opinion swung too. Queen Mary died without issue, and Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was proclaimed Queen of England. She would turn the country Protestant again. Despite many plots and actions against her, Elizabeth reined for forty-five years.  It seems that in this daughter that he considered illegitimate, Henry had found the strong 'male' heir to bring stability to his country. If only he’d realized it earlier, so many lives would have been saved, and history could have been changed completely.



Cate Blanchett ~ a magnificent turn as Queen Elizabeth

A Connecticut Vampire in King Arthur’s Court

Welcome to a new series of Blog posts; Excerpts from my new work in progress- A Connecticut Vampire in King Arthur’s Court.

Although these will not tell the story exhaustively, they will hopefully let you know how the story is progressing and how our hero, Richard DeVere, is coping.  Bear in mind that because this is a work-in-progress, it is the ‘rough draft’, straight off the pen version, unedited, no re-writes here.

I’ll start at page one…

Chapter 1
Unknown date, Bedchamber
Never being known for any outward bursts of emotion, I pressed my back against the cold stone wall. Sweating, I panted quietly, allowing my breathing to return to as close to normal as my current circumstances would allow. The room before me lay dimly lit, only by a duet of candles either side of the rather grand bed. Apart from two antique drawer units, the room lay bare. I did the usual anti-panic measures; I pinched myself, I slapped my cheek lightly, then I spoke.

 “Hello?”

Everything seemed perfectly normal. Except, of course, that seconds before I had been spiraling in mortal combat with my enemy, Keith Cornwall; two vampires in a fight to the death. I’d crossed his path too many times to underestimate his hatred for me, and I had decided to fight this time, get it all over with. Either he’d win or I, he’d pissed me off far too many times in the last four years not to get a definite outcome.

But it seemed Keith and I were fairly evenly matched. In the end, with neither gaining the advantage in a kind of bear hug, we’d begun to spin. And vampires can move pretty fast. In fact, we’d been spinning so rapidly, my head still felt light and disorientated. Now here I was, alone in a cold, dark bedroom.

I took a step towards the light, and was alarmed by the loud crunching of my cowboy boots on the straw strewn on the smooth stone floor. Stone, not tile. Sensing movement outside the room, I stopped to listen and heard footfalls outside the door. I flattened myself against the wall again, sidling towards the darker corner, my boot soles again scraping against the stone.

The door burst open, and a gangly teenage boy raced in aiming himself at the bed, his long nightshirt trailing after him like a milky Superman cape.

“I shan’t write another letter, I shan’t!” he screamed, landing with a considerable thump on the bedding.

Considering the advances in mattress manufacture, I could have made some recommendations. I mean, this bed just didn’t give anything under his aerial assault.

An arm stretched inside the room, and pulled the door closed. “Goodnight your highness.”

Oh boy, not only a cold dark bedroom, but a brat to contend with.

“Me solum relinquatis!” he yelled over his shoulder at the closed door.

Wow, that surprised me for a comeback. I know Latin when I hear it. When I was eighteen, I’d done a year’s work placement at a lawyers firm in my home town of Hartford, Connecticut, and although I didn’t know what he’d said, it had sounded good.

Then he began muttering under his breath, his hands tightly clasped. I assumed he was praying, then he confirmed it by rolling over onto his back and crossing himself. With a petulant aimed breath at each candle, he threw the room into total darkness.  In minutes, the sounds of light snoring drifted across the void....

Doctor Who meets Dracula- a Time-Travelling Vampire

I never really intended to write any of my novels. I just started writing, and a sentence became a short story, then the short story became a chapter, then, a few years/months later, out popped a book into the cradling arms of its daddy- me!


hmm, perhaps we could get David Tennant for the title role?

On the other hand, when I began  A Connecticut Vampire in King Arthur’s Court  I had a complete goal in my mind. Not only a novel, but a trilogy- plot lines, titles, everything. It wasn’t like me at all. 

I had the ‘hook’- The title's play on Mark Twain's original time travel novel would spark attention.

I had the genre- Time travelling vampire; Doctor Who meets Dracula, a Bram Stoker’s Sam Beckett gone haywire.

I had the reluctant flawed character, racked with guilt, needing to squeeze revenge out of the situation. On his own, out of his depth, and no vampire buddies to fall back on.

Most importantly, I had the ‘history’…The deeply researched rich tapestry of Tudor England, with a twist; I was telling the story of a Prince that most people didn’t know; Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry the Seventh, big brother of Henry the Eighth, and first husband of Catherine of Aragon. Called Arthur as a throwback to England’s glorious mythical ages, he was a boy born to unite two warring factions in England. A unifying entity to end the bitter rivalries of the War of the Roses. He ended up being neither.
 

From the first line I threw my character in at the deep end.  A time-travelling vampire, thrown back five hundred and twelve years and a quarter of the earth’s diameter. Completely immersing myself in the project, in my first day I wrote 2000 words. I followed that pace for at least another ten days before faltering.

I wrote the entire 68,500 words in 51 days. I knew the punishing pace would be difficult at times, but little did I know it would be so much fun! I loved every page of it, and couldn’t keep the baby to myself.
 

I stopped. I had a day off. Then I sat the next morning, wondering what to write, and another 2000 words fell from my digitalized pen. Then another 2000. I’m five days into book two, A Connecticut Vampire in Queen Mary’s Court, and have already crossed the 10,000 word barrier. I’ve set myself a target: a trilogy in six months.

We all have stories in our heads. We all have time to sit at the computer. We all wonder if we’ll ever get published, if we’ll ever get discovered, if we’ll ever get famous. But we won’t find any of the above if we don’t write. And don’t think ‘luck’ is all you need.

Samuel Goldwyn once said; “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” As I sit at my computer tomorrow morning, churning out my next 2000 words, I’ll pray that I’ll get luckier too.

 

Time Travel, Vampires and 10,000 Words

Suprise, suprise- Ive another new project on the go!   Im just starting book two of my vampire/time travel adventure, this one entitled A Connecticut Vampire in Queen Mary's Court... 10,000 words in five days... still on fire...

 "I unlocked the door, and burst in, to find her advancing on me, smiling, tears falling down her beautiful face. Smiling in return, I slipped my dagger smoothly into her chest. I heard her dress tear, I felt a slight resistance as my blade separated her ribs, then I heard the gurgling as I pierced her heart. As she frowned at me questioningly, croaked her last unpronounceable words, and fell limp into my arms, a knife fell to the ground between us, clattering on the floor. I bent to pick it up. The thin blade had been coated in sticky green ichor. I had dodged another bullet."

Queen Mary 1 aka "Bloody Mary"

I finished the first volume, A Connecticut Vampire in King Arthur's Court, in 51 days. Here's brief excerpt

"The large four poster bed stood against one wall; only piece of furniture in the bedchamber, with a dark ornate carved headboard containing the coats of arms of both Arthur and Catherine. I pushed at the ‘mattress’ with the heel of my hand, finding it hard and unforgiving. The top coverlet was embroidered gold, but underneath, fine white silk sheets lay stretched tightly, the clean artist’s canvas for the coming night’s bloody painting. These, the sheets that would be held high for all to see, proving beyond doubt the broken hymen of a Spanish princess. The bloody stains that would be reported back to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella as the successful ploughing of her virgin daughter by a fifteen year old boy."

A Connecticut Vampire in King Arthur's Court  by Ian Hall will be published on Amazon very soon, and if things continued the way they have been, it will be soon followed by book two... stay tuned for the launch announcement. Hope you enjoy!