How did an army of thousands disappear? A new historical novel has a theory

It was the missing men that got Minette Walters started on her new historical novel. She was looking up the figures for the Monmouth rebellion against James II. An army of 7000 supported the Duke of Monmouth when he challenged the king in 1685. But when Monmouth was defeated and executed, and his followers were rounded up and charged with treason, where did they all go?

“Only just over 2000 were ever tried,” she says. “And only 300 went to the gallows. I said to myself, ‘How did that happen?’

“A number of them were sent as slaves to Barbados. They were dispatched, but they never got there. It was thought the ships foundered. But I thought it would be much more fun if they didn’t go, and I’m certain that’s what happened.”

Author Minette Walters.Credit: Fabio de Paola

Clearly, all these men must have had help to escape the unpopular king’s harsh justice. And that’s where Walters’ imagination stepped in to create The Players. She invented a trio of helpers: a female physician, Lady Jane Harrier; her son Elias, a wily negotiator and cunning spy; and Althea, a brilliant young woman living a bookish, reclusive life because she is ashamed of her disability. Together, they embark on a dangerous quest.

Actually, Jane Harrier had already starred in Walters’ previous novel, The Swift and the Harrier, set three decades earlier during England’s Civil War. “Everybody loved her, so I brought her back,” Walters says.

She is talking to me via Zoom from her home office in Dorset, looking out at her chickens clustering around the French windows. Once one of the world’s most successful crime novelists, with 14 novels sold in 34 countries and sales of more than 25 million copies, she chose to end the dream run with 2007’s The Chameleon’s Shadow. By then, she was feeling somewhat “trapped” in the genre.

She’d always wanted to write about the Black Death, so she started her first historical novel, 2017’s The Last Hours, about a Dorset woman who quarantined her domain from the ravages of the pestilence in 1348. When COVID-19 came along, “I got a lot of people emailing me and saying, ‘You’re the expert, what can we do?’ It was very strange.”

Her next novel, The Turn of Midnight, concluded her look at the plague years. And then she jumped forward from medieval times to the 17th century. She’s fascinated by this turbulent period in British history, and she’s alert to the many similarities to today’s politics – bar the killings – in a country still divided over Brexit.

And yet, this period doesn’t seem to be taught much in schools. “It drives me bonkers,” Walters says. “This is how we developed our constitutional monarchy and our democracy.”

It was a long and painful road before joint monarchs William III and Mary took charge in 1688 and agreed to reduce royal powers. The Civil War lasted nine years and took more lives than World War I, in terms of a percentage of the population. Charles I was beheaded, and Oliver Cromwell imposed his own decade of despotic rule as Lord Protector. After a calmer interlude under Charles II, James II inherited the throne. A fanatic Catholic, he was determined to put down Protestant enemies and sentence thousands of Monmouth’s rebels to the horrible punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering.

One of the most colourful characters in The Players is a real person: George Jeffreys, known as the Hanging Judge, who ferociously prosecuted the rebels in trials dubbed the Bloody Assizes.

“I live near Dorchester, and they still have the Hanging Judge’s Tea Rooms,” Walters says. “He’s still a figure of great hatred in the South-West [of England]. Nobody has ever forgotten what he did.” She portrays him as monstrously brusque and rude, callous about his victims, impatient to get through the huge list of defendants by giving them false assurances of leniency if they pleaded guilty.

But Walters is also sympathetic to Jeffreys. “I was interested in giving him a slightly softer side. He was an incredibly sick man, constantly in pain, he died at 43 – effectively, his kidneys failed him. And he self-medicated. He retained the ability to be drunk as a skunk but still be an extraordinary lawyer. Everybody recognises what a clever and ambitious man he was but by obeying James, he made himself completely and utterly hated.”

Jane Harrier manages to influence Jeffreys because she is the only doctor who can treat his pain. Although female physicians were illegal in those times, Walters has drawn from the lives of three successful women doctors who had support from the top of society for their practice. “I always have strong, independently minded women in my novels,” she says. “I get asked a lot, did women like that exist? Yes, of course, they did. Look at any of the queens. If women had been writers, they would have written about women. But it was men who wrote the histories, and men with big egos and lots of money captured the headlines.”

Minette Walters in Dorset, where she and her husband live in a historic manor house.Credit: Fabio De Paola

She’s glad that young women today want to have careers. “When I was growing up, my mother said, ‘You’ve got to marry well.’ I thought, ‘Like hell.’ I have a lovely husband, but I didn’t marry him so he could look after me.”

In an earlier career, Walters was an editor of hospital romances. “I could only have stories about doctors and nurses, and I needed eight titles a month. I can’t tell you the amount of dreadful stuff I got. People’s idea was you stuck a doctor and nurse together and they fall in love. Then they talk about the wedding. So I wrote a story myself to demonstrate that you need a plot.”

She submitted it to her boss at the publishing house without telling him she’d written it, and he said it was twice as good as anything else she’d published. “So he let me write 38 novelettes of 30,000 words each. It was amazing practice. I was writing and editing other people’s stuff and I trained as a subeditor, so when I wrote my first crime novel, I’d got the skills, and they have stood me in good stead ever since.”

Not that it was easy to find a publisher for that first crime novel, The Ice House. She’d given up on it when it was finally taken up by Maria Rejt at Macmillan, who had been an assistant to a publisher who had turned it down. When Rejt became an editor, she asked if it was still for sale. Published in 1992, it took off worldwide, selling to almost 40 countries.

Walters continues to write historical stories with a strong local connection: her home county of Dorset was at the centre of both the Civil War conflict and the Monmouth rebellion. If you drive through the rolling hills and valleys, it hasn’t changed much, she says, and there’s a great research source in the Dorset History Centre. She’s now working on a book that combines crime and history. “It’s about smugglers in the 18th century, and I’m having a rollicking good time,” she says. “Riding officers used to patrol the coast and so many of them were killed.

“It was organised crime, like the mafia. But nobody hated them because everything was much cheaper when you bought it from a smuggler.”

The Players by Minette Walters (Allen & Unwin) is out now.

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