The Guardian

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Authors: Jack Whyte

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The Guardian

Also by Jack Whyte

A DREAM OF EAGLES

The Skystone

The Singing Sword

The Eagles’ Brood

The Saxon Shore

The Sorcerer, Volume I: The Fort at River’s Bend

The Sorcerer, Volume II: Metamorphosis

Uther

THE GOLDEN EAGLE

Clothar the Frank

The Eagle

THE TEMPLAR TRILOGY

Knights of the Black and White

Standard of Honor

Order in Chaos

THE GUARDIANS SERIES

The Forest Laird

The Renegade

Jack Whyte

The Guardian

A TALE OF ANDREW MURRAY

To my granddaughter Jessica and her husband, Jake Strashok, who is what I have always secretly wanted to be: a metalsmith.
And to my dear wife, Beverley, for being herself.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I
n my recent travels, meeting and greeting my readers, and even in my daily interactions with people who are not my readers but who know, from various sources, that I write historical novels, one question recurs with frequency: “What
is
historical fiction?”

I’ve heard this question ever since I first became a published author, but in the past few years the number of people asking it has multiplied so noticeably that I now feel obliged to try to answer it. So let me see if I can.

On the most visible level it’s a genre, of course, a recognizable story form that’s easy to hang a label upon. (Allow me to digress. Although this genre is growing increasingly popular everywhere in the English-speaking world, it is one of the strangest anomalies of the book-selling trade in North America that the major bookstore chains refuse to recognize it. Readers everywhere are clamouring for it more and more loudly each year, but bookstores appear deaf. There are no Historical Fiction departments in our North American bookstores, and that gives rise to strange bedfellows. This book you are holding now—very clearly a historical novel—is probably shelved in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section. That is because my first series of books, called A Dream of Eagles in Canada and the Camulod Chronicles in the U.S.A., offered a speculative but feasible perspective on the probable beginnings of the Arthurian legend, set in fifth-century post-Roman Britain. It was historical, but it was also speculative fiction. Most telling of all, though, it mentioned King Arthur, and so it was designated fantasy and shelved accordingly. But because of that, my last two historical trilogies, dealing respectively with the rise and fall of the medieval Knights Templar and the fourteenth-century Scottish Wars of Independence, have also been consigned to the Fantasy and Sci-Fi shelves, in utter disregard of
the minor consideration that they contain no slightest hint of either fantasy or science fiction.)

So what
is
historical fiction? I believe the best of it amounts to a transcription of thoroughly researched records of genuine historical events embellished, emphasized, and made more appreciable to modern readers with one single element of historical commentary that is taboo among academic and classical historians. That element is speculation. Historians know, for example, that King Edward I of England spent an entire night in May of the year 1290 cloistered with Antony Bek, the Prince Bishop of Durham, in a guarded room in Norham Castle on the Scots border, and that Bek left for Scotland the following morning, there to announce himself as King Edward’s deputy in arranging the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland through a marriage between Princess Margaret of Norway, the child heir to the vacant Scottish throne, and King Edward’s first-born son, the boy Edward, Prince of Wales. They know that, but the all-night meeting was behind closed doors with nothing written down for posterity, so they know nothing of what was actually said between the two men that night, and as academic historians they are forbidden to speculate.

That speculation falls within the purview of the writer of historical fiction, who is completely at liberty to put words into the mouths of the participants, with the sole proviso that he or she can say nothing that contradicts the known historical record. And so the historical novelist possesses a power that is almost magical compared with the straightforward recitation of known facts inhibiting the academics: the novelist can breathe life into the otherwise lifeless and unappreciated protagonists and participants in great historical events, and the really gifted storytellers can transform ancient worlds into reality, enabling their readers to appreciate and understand that their ancestors, the people who inhabited those times and places and lived through great and remarkable events centuries or millennia ago, were people like themselves, facing exactly the same fundamental problems that beset us today, with all our supposed advantages. For then, as now, the problems facing an
ordinary, undistinguished man were straightforward and unavoidable—to feed his family and dependents and to keep them safe, with the best and strongest roof over their heads that he could provide— and the role of a responsible woman, in any society, has been unchanged since Eve first smiled at Adam. It is the skill of historical novelists in making those things clear while cleaving as closely as possible to historical accuracy that has led to the recent enormous upsurge in demand for the wondrous stories that are found in historical novels, the genre that the booksellers will tell you doesn’t exist.

What most people don’t know about, though, is the genuinely massive difficulty in dealing with language accurately, and that, too, increases the demand for accuracy in reporting by the historical novelist. Standard English, as we know it today, became standardized only during the reign of Queen Victoria. Before that there was no such thing as orthography, no formal rules of spelling or syntax. Everyone who was literate was free to spell anything the way he or she thought fit. And even more confusing, less than two hundred years ago people from different regions of the same country—of
any
country—couldn’t speak to or understand one another. Every little town and village had its own dialect and its own idioms. In Scotland, for example, the port town of Aberdeen had its own language, spoken only by Aberdonians. Two hundred years ago in Britain, which is where I grew up, Londoners couldn’t speak with people from Devon or Cornwall or from Yorkshire or Lancashire or Dorset, and God knows they couldn’t converse with Gaelic-speaking Scots or Irishmen or Welshmen. But they all understood their neighbours perfectly, and they conversed fluently in whatever dialect was common to them; and when they needed to, as people always have, they invented bastard languages to permit them to trade with one another. The only means the historical novelist has of dealing with such delicate intricacies is his or her own skill in the manipulation of language and suggestion.

And so I invite my readers, once again, to share my perception, my interpretation, of the world in which my heroes lived in fourteenth-century Scotland. Seven hundred years have elapsed
since William Wallace, Andrew Murray, and Robert Bruce fought their campaigns in the name of freedom, but their struggle against tyranny and usurpation is still going on today, around our modern world.

Jack Whyte

Kelowna, British Columbia

August 31, 2014

CHAPTER ONE

FATHER JAMES WALLACE, 1343

I
discovered many years ago that Sir Lionel Redvers was the first English knight ever to die at the hands of my cousin William Wallace of Elderslie, and while the discovery pained me at the time, it also gave me a moment of vengeful satisfaction. I have confessed that sin on many occasions but it remains within me unforgiven, for I have never really regretted the satisfaction I derived from it.

Redvers was an undistinguished knight from the county of Suffolk. I only ever met him once, and briefly, and had immediately dismissed him as a nonentity. But within minutes of our encounter he proved how strange are the ways of God, for even a nonentity may be a catalyst. That headstrong, zealous fool changed every life in Scotland and plunged the whole of Britain into chaos because he brought about the deaths of a woman, her small son, and her unborn second child. The woman was in my care at the time and her name was Mirren Wallace. She was William Wallace’s wife and therefore cousin to me by marriage.

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