The Inspiration behind By Love Divided, The Lydiard Chronicles, Book Two, by Elizabeth St. John

Widowed and destitute, Lucy St.John is fighting for survival and makes a terrible choice to secure a future for her children. Worse still, her daughter Luce rejects the royal court and a wealthy arranged marriage and falls in love with a charismatic soldier. As England tumbles toward bloody civil war, Luce’s beloved brother Allen chooses to fight for the king as a cavalier. Allen and Luce are swept up in the chaos of war as they defend their opposing causes and protect those they love.

Will war unite or divide them? And will they find love and a home to return to—if they survive the horror of civil war? In the dawn of England’s great rebellion, love is the final battleground.

A true story based on surviving memoirs, court papers, and letters of Elizabeth St.John's family, By Love Divided tells of the war-time experiences of Lucy St.John, the Lady of the Tower. This powerfully emotional novel tells of England's great divide and the heart-wrenching choices one family faces.

 

An Author's Inspiration

A Diary Discovered. A World Revealed

Writing about my family’s Civil War experience

Lydiard House

Growing up in England where the weather promotes reading and the countryside is full of castles and ancient churches, I spent much of my childhood buried in old books, family papers, and walking around ruins. My parents loved history and passed that gene on to me. Our favorite days were spent “St.John-hunting” where we would follow some thread in our family tree and end up in a forgotten churchyard or country house, face-to-face with an ancestor. When I came to write The Lady of the Tower, I felt I knew the characters intimately because of my familiarity with their correspondence and diaries, and that so many of their portraits are preserved at our ancestral home of Lydiard House.

 Lucy Hutchinson

I’m very fortunate since my family kept some personal documents, and an extensive family tree preserved on great pieces of Antiquarian sized paper which had been handed down by generations. Those inspired me to want to write only relying on primary sources, and so I then visited museums and libraries where records might be stored. By Love Divided draws on Lucy Hutchinson’s seventeenth-century memoirs, which are archived at Nottingham Castle. When I first encountered them twenty years ago, they were hidden in a battered file cabinet in the castle offices, and by asking and poking around I was thrilled to see the notebooks firsthand. So although pretty much all my records are accessible to the general public, it can take a lot of detective work to find them.

Lucy Apsley's signature

 

However, reading about the past is not the same as writing about it, and for me, the most challenging part of capturing my ancestors on paper was to ensure that I stayed as true to their characters as I could. I did this by reading as many extant documents as possible – even fragments of a letter, or the inventory accompanying a will can give so many clues into a person’s life. And then, looking at the actions across their lives can sometimes inform their character. In researching Allen Apsley, Lucy St.John’s son in By Love Divided, I came across a record that he frequently came drunk into Parliament. That started a whole train of thought that perhaps he was suffering from PTSD as a result of his action in the Civil War, and so I then sought to find evidence that might support that.

 

Writing about the English Civil War in By Love Divided, I was really determined to bring independent fresh eyes to the conflict, and that made for an extremely interesting journey. Firstly, the ambiguity of the war as it unfolded struck home. A credible historical fiction writer has to “write in the now”; our characters don’t know what lies ahead, although we (often tragically) do. In the 1630s and ‘40s, so many people were making decisions based on very limited knowledge, hear-say, and confusing information. And, they really didn’t think that their actions would lead to armed conflict. Loyalties were fluid – often more to their Land Lords than to any particular cause. And, as in any war, the masses just wanted to get on with their daily lives.

The St. John family

circa 17th Century

 

When I was writing The Lady of the Tower, I didn’t intentionally set out to write a series. And yet, I knew there were many fascinating stories to be told of my ancestors. Reaching the end of the novel, I realized that I could not leave Lucy’s world. My readers wanted to know more, and so By Love Divided was born. A much broader landscape than the first book, this novel is readable as a stand-alone but also satisfies those readers who wanted to know what happened to The Lady of the Tower. And of course, there’s always more to tell.

 

In By Love Divided, we left the family at the end of the first Civil War, hoping for a peaceful negotiation and a resumption of normal life. We all know it didn’t work out that way. And both Allen Apsley and John Hutchinson played a key role in the world-changing events that followed. The third book in the Lydiard Chronicles, Written in Their Stars, brings the family full circle back to the Tower of London. Only not, this time, as keepers — but as prisoners.

 

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About the Author

Elizabeth St.John

Elizabeth St.John spends her time between California, England, and the past. An acclaimed author, historian, and genealogist, she has tracked down family papers and residences from Lydiard Park and Nottingham Castle to Richmond Palace and the Tower of London to inspire her novels. Although the family sold a few country homes along the way (it's hard to keep a good castle going these days), Elizabeth's family still occupy them-- in the form of portraits, memoirs, and gardens that carry their legacy. And the occasional ghost. But that's a different story.

Having spent a significant part of her life with her seventeenth-century family while writing The Lydiard Chronicles trilogy and Counterpoint series, Elizabeth St.John is now discovering new family stories with her fifteenth-century namesake Elysabeth St.John Scrope, and her half-sister, Margaret Beaufort. A new medieval short story featuring these women, Road to the Tower, is within the recently-published Historical Fiction anthology Betrayal.

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