The inspiration behind Beneath Black Clouds and White by Virginia Crow

Despite adoring his family and enjoying frequenting gaming tables, Captain Josiah Tenterchilt’s true love is the British Army and he is committed to his duty. As such, he does not hesitate to answer the army’s call when King Louis XVI of France is executed.

Accompanied by his wife to Flanders, Josiah finds his path crosses with a man who could not be more different from him: an apprentice surgeon named Henry Fotherby. As these two men pursue their own actions, fate and the careful connivance of a mysterious individual will push them together for the rest of their lives.

But it is a tumultuous time, and the French revolutionaries are not the only ones who pose a threat. The two gentlemen must find their place in a world where the constraints of social class are inescapable, and ‘slavery or abolition’ are the words on everyone’s lips.

Beneath Black Clouds and White is the prequel to Day's Dying Glory, which was published by Crowvus in April 2017.

The inspiration behind Black Clouds and White

Virginia Crow

God and the Devil in the Deeds of a Surgeon

Beneath Black Clouds and White was the third book I wrote with the Tenterchilt family, so I’d already got to know them quite well. I had planned out every aspect of their lives from 1806-1855, spanning three generations. I had looked into the evolution of social constraints over that time, as well as the military advancements made (the Tenterchilts are a military family, with only occasional deviations from this rule).

But now it was time for something different. I was ready to go backward in time. And so I told the story of how the paths, which would later build this dynasty, first crossed. I don’t want to spoil the later stories for anyone who hasn’t read them, but the friendship between Josiah Tenterchilt and Henry Fotherby was one that would last them both for their whole lives.

The only problem was this:

When we meet Henry Fotherby in Day’s Dying Glory, he is a disillusioned former army surgeon, who is now a doctor. I knew he had an amazing backstory, but to tell it to its full worth, I had to really explore the world of military and civilian medicine and surgery during the 1790s.

I do almost all my research under the cautionary – and seemingly contradicting – phrases:

God is in the details

and

The devil is in the detail

I had flippantly remarked in Day’s Dying Glory that Fotherby had saved Major Tenterchilt’s leg and life after he was wounded several years ago. I’d been content to know that such things were reported to have happened, usually by the soldiers in question. But now I’d embarked upon this prequel, it was not enough to know that it happened, I needed to know how it happened.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, medicine and surgery were both beginning to make speedier advancements. But much of what was practiced could still be traced back to ancient techniques. As warfare had evolved, however, the surgery to deal with it evolved too.

So I delved into the world of medicine.

Buxton letter of thanks to a physician

One of the most fascinating things was how effectively primitive methods were used. Simple things, like using a cut onion to draw out toxin from a wound. Who comes up with that?

Also, and somewhat disturbing, was looking through the implements which were used in battlefield surgery. The lack of reliable anaesthetic was a big thing, and the accounts I read of both successful and fatal procedures, could have made much more comfortable reading with a dose or two of ketamine!

As it was, here is how events played out in the novel:

“This is your challenge, Fotherby. If you fail in this then the army will not have you back no matter how many exams you take.”

The weight of the man’s words fell heavily on his shoulders as Captain Peters thrust the scalpel towards him. He bit his lower lip thoughtfully as he accepted the instrument from his captain’s outstretched hand. Not daring to look at Kitson, he stepped over to the campaign desk and exchanged the scalpel for a thin pair of long-handled forceps and tried to stop his hands from shaking. He knew he was doing the right thing. Whatever Peters and Kitson thought, this was a new battlefield procedure, successfully practised during the American war.

Kitson stepped away from the table, his hands raised in a surrendering gesture, before he returned to tend some of the other wounded men. Peters nodded slowly towards Fotherby before he took Captain Tenterchilt’s shoulders and tried to hold him still, but he awoke and tried to free himself of the man who stood over him.

With a strength that surprised Fotherby, Peters pushed him back down with one hand and, snatching the leather strap of Captain Tenterchilt’s sword belt, he pushed it into the man’s mouth.

“Get on with it, Fotherby.”

Fotherby tried to ignore the twitches the man before him made. He applied a tourniquet and, pinning Captain Tenterchilt’s leg still beneath him, stretched the wound open far enough to allow the forceps into the man’s tissue. If he felt that at any point he was losing his control he considered all that weighed upon his success and, selfishly, he realised that it was not solely this man’s life, nor the happiness of his wife whose heartrending distress he had witnessed earlier, that was at stake. It was a proof that he could go on to achieve that goal he had dreamt of as a surgeon. As he delved further into the man’s leg, Captain Tenterchilt’s movements became more and more desperate, so that Fotherby almost lost control of the instrument in his hand, before at last he felt the ends of the forceps close about the shot. Pulling it back as gently as he could, he tried to steady his shaking hand. The ball slipped only once before Fotherby pulled it out from the captain’s leg. Captain Tenterchilt lay still, his eyes were closed and his body no longer tried to resist the crude surgery. For a moment Fotherby thought that he had died but, as he poured a sprinkling of wine into the man’s wound, the captain forced himself out of the hold that Peters had on him and tried to reach his leg. Fotherby stumbled away from such a gesture but Peters snatched the captain to him and, holding his arm about Captain Tenterchilt’s throat, spoke calmly to his apprentice.

“Are you to stitch the wound, Fotherby?”

Fotherby nodded quickly and tried to steady his nerves and his hands to thread the circular needle before he proceeded to apply surprisingly neat stitches to the wound. He felt quietly proud of himself as he stood back to admire his work. But as his gaze turned to the pained face of the man he had just operated on, spitting out the leather belt which was now peppered with tooth marks, he felt his resolve shatter and the needle slipped from his fingers as he fumbled with the knife to sever the thick thread.

Ultimately, it is this scene which sets up everything which follows in the book, and its sequels (of which there are three, but only one published so far!). It is this daring procedure which enables Fotherby to qualify and, when he is challenged on it by the Royal College of Surgeons, he responds:

“when the alternative is death it is a good time to put the case for living to the test.”

It was important to Fotherby’s character that he not only knew but also acted upon the latest medical advancements. This meant that I was flicking through some of the most obscure and – quite frankly – terrifying accounts of what the surgeon did to their fellow men in the hopes of bettering their lives. But Fotherby is an idealist throughout the books and, if he sees that something has worked, he is always eager to put it to the test.

After researching the surgery aspects of the medical history, next came the qualification side. This was much lighter reading, thank goodness! I found a couple of accounts from individuals who had partaken in the exams during the years around when Fotherby would have been there and placed my setting within their description. Writing it up was pretty fun, working within the confines of the accounts while putting Fotherby’s rose-tinted outlook on it all. Remembering that God and the devil were lurking in the finer details, I reviewed the policy of Surgeons’ Hall in regard to qualifications and had the grumpy clerk announce:

“Next exam is on 20th February then again on 6th March. First and third Thursdays each month. If you have a genuine interest in joining the Surgeons’ Hall you should have known that.”

But, not dissuaded for more than a short while, Fotherby qualifies. By the end of the book, he has undergone the complete transition from a young man with big dreams to a gentleman with enough qualifications to make him a doctor.

I like to think my foray into medical history provides an extra three-dimensional slant to the storytelling. It certainly sparked a fascination within me and, since writing Beneath Black Clouds and White, I’ve always been meticulous about the topic.

Kirkmichael Graveyard

At the moment, I’m writing a Middle-Grade novel set during the Black Death outbreak in Kirkmichael for a class at our local primary school. In many ways, it’s a gruelling topic to research – and trickier still to make it Middle Grade appropriate! – but I like to imagine Fotherby back then and how he might have responded to it. He would have made it all make sense and, via the details with God and the devil, I hope that’s what I managed to do, too.

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About the Author

 Virginia Crow

 Virginia grew up in Orkney, using the breath-taking scenery to fuel her imagination and the writing fire within her. Her favourite genres to write are fantasy and historical fiction, sometimes mixing the two together such as her newly-published book "Caledon". She enjoys swashbuckling stories such as The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and is still waiting for a screen adaption that lives up to the book! When she's not writing, Virginia is usually to be found teaching music, and obtained her MLitt in "History of the Highlands and Islands" last year. She believes wholeheartedly in the power of music, especially as a tool of inspiration. She also helps out with the John O'Groats Book Festival which is celebrating its 3rd year this April. She now lives in the far-flung corner of Scotland, soaking in inspiration from the rugged cliffs and miles of sandy beaches. She loves cheese, music, and films, but hates mushrooms.

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Fighting for freedom: the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution

History Extra

A contemporary illustration of the Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789. (Musee Carnavalet-AKG Images)

1789–1815: The world in revolt

David Andress explains how the events of 1789 were an attempt to strip society of the inequalities of privilege, at a time when ‘freedom’ had a very confused meaning

The medieval fortress-prison of the Bastille loomed over eastern Paris. For centuries the enemies and victims of royal power had been carried there in shuttered coaches, and rumours ran of unspeakable tortures in its dungeons. On 14 July 1789 Parisians stormed the fortress, their rage against aristocratic enemies they thought ready to destroy the city to save their privilege driving some to suicidal bravery.
Men leapt over rooftops to smash drawbridge chains, others dismantled cannon and hauled them by hand over barricades. The tiny garrison yielded on the point of being overwhelmed, and at the news, royal troops elsewhere in the city packed up and marched away, their officers unwilling to try their loyalty against the triumphant people.
The storming of the Bastille was the high-water mark of a wave of insurrection that swept France in the summer of 1789. Events that created the very idea of ‘revolution’ as the modern world was to know it, as a complete overthrowing of an old order, followed a failed attempt to prop up an absolute monarchy.
That monarchy had bankrupted itself, in one of the greatest ironies of this age, paying for a war of liberation halfway around the world. When the French king Louis XVI heeded the enthusiasts for American independence and sent his troops and fleets to fight the British Empire in 1778, he thought he was dealing a death-blow to an age-old foe. In fact, he launched a process that would make Britain an even more dominant global power than it had been before the United States broke free. But he would also create, against his will, a culture of equality and rights with a disputed heritage all the way to the present day.

A battle for the regency

France’s ancient enemy, Britain, was facing its own crisis as 1789 dawned. King George III had fallen into raving mania, and a bitter political battle was under way for the powers of a regency. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, after five years in office as the country’s youngest ever premier, had never shaken off the view of his opponents that his rule was an unconstitutional imposition. Placed in office in 1783 by the king’s favour, his government had faced threats of impeachment before a hard-fought 1784 election had given him a working majority. Now the opposition, led by Charles James Fox, saw the chance to eject Pitt when their royal patron, the Prince of Wales, took on the regency.
In America a transition scarcely less delicate or contested was in train. The years after independence in 1783 were a time of political and fiscal disorder. For two years the much-disputed form of a new constitution for the new nation crept towards fulfilment. ‘Federalists’ and ‘Antifederalists’ clashed vigorously, and occasionally violently, over the powers of central government, and though George Washington was unanimously chosen in January 1789 to be the first president,  many still feared that the new power-structure would subject them to a tyranny as great as the British one they had escaped.
At stake in all of these countries was a tangled web of ideas about the meaning of freedom, its connection to the concept of rights, and the besetting question of whether such terms covered the privileged possessions of a few, or were the natural heritage of all. For the Anglo-American world, freedom and rights had first been seen as the historical consequence of a very particular evolution.
From the medieval days of Magna Carta and the time-honoured maxims of English Common Law, radicals in Britain and its North American colonies drew an inspiration which blended seamlessly with the new philosophies of men such as John Locke in the 1680s, so that rebellious Virginians in 1776 could assert boldly that, “All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Yet as they did so, they also excluded their very many slaves from these same rights. To the west, in the Kentucky territory, and further north in the borderlands of the Ohio, white Americans were to show through the 1780s, and beyond, that the Indian nations of the continent also lacked the mysterious qualities necessary to participate in Locke’s ‘natural’ rights.
Many on the more radical side of British politics, meanwhile, had supported the American quest for freedom, and seen it as part of a larger transatlantic struggle against tyranny. In this tradition, the ousting of the Catholic king, James II, in 1688 was hailed as a victory for liberty, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ on which British freedoms were founded. Celebrating its centenary in November 1788, the speaker at a grand dinner of such radicals expressed a wish for universal freedoms, that, “England and France may no longer continue their ancient hostility against each other; but that France may regain possession of her liberties; and that two nations, so eminently distinguished... may unite together in communicating the advantages of freedom, science and the arts to the most remote regions of the earth.”
Such talk was cheap, however. While George III recovered from his madness in Britain and the United States eased slowly into existence across the Atlantic, in France the clash between the forces of freedom and privilege, rights and subjection, was played out in a dire and epochal confrontation.
Harassed by the need for money to pay off the state’s debts, the French monarchy found itself trapped between incompatible visions of reform. On one side stood institutions that claimed to be time-honoured defenders of liberty against overweening power. French nobles and judges asserted their rights to protect the nation from arbitrary rule, in the name of an unwritten constitutional tradition much like that accepted in Britain. For such men, the route to reform was through a more consistent acknowledgement of ancient rights, a more balanced approach to government – where what was to be ‘balanced’ were the interests of Crown and aristocratic elites.

_{To Versailles! An engraving showing an army of citizens marching on the French royal palace on 5 October 1789 to protest against King Louis XVI. (Musee Carnavalet, Paris-Dagli Orti-Art Archive)}

Radical renegades

On the other side were the advocates of thoroughgoing change. Some, like the comte de Mirabeau, were radical renegades from noble ranks; others, like Emmanuel Sieyès, had risen from humble birth (in his case through the ranks of the church). Though much of the late 1780s had seen such reformers in alliance with the defenders of the unwritten constitution, half a century of the philosophy and subversion of the Enlightenment had pushed the arguments of this grouping towards a dramatic divergence.
Enlightened thinking challenged the long-standing connections between belief in a universe created by God, the authority of religion over public life, and the hierarchical and authoritarian social and political order that such religion defended as ‘natural’. With sciences from physiology to physics on their side, thinkers set out a fresh role for the free individual in society. They wanted a new order – still a monarchy, but one both publicly accountable, and stripped of the buttresses of privilege that kept the talents of the majority from reaching the peaks of public office.
The Crown’s desperate straits had driven it to answer the calls of the massed ranks of its critics for an Estates-General – a national consultative assembly that had not met for almost two centuries. What should have been a panacea provoked a further sharp divide, as the privileged nobility and clergy were granted half the delegates, and possibly two-thirds of the votes. As the opening of the Estates in May 1789 approached, the mood turned apocalyptic.
Sieyès had written at the start of the year that trying to place noble privilege within a new constitution was “like deciding on the appropriate place in the body of a sick man for a malignant tumour... It must be neutralised”. His aristocratic opponents lamented “this general agitation of public insanity” to strip them of their ancient rights, making “the whole universe” seem “in the throes of convulsions”.
This conflict of words was already matched by one of deeds. Harsh weather and poor harvests had left French peasants impoverished and anxious. The political storm over the Estates-General provoked fears of an aristocratic plot to beat the people into submission. By the spring of 1789 tithes and dues owed to clergy and privileged landlords were being refused, and in some cases abbeys and châteaux were invaded, their stocks looted and records destroyed.
Meanwhile, urban populations, dependent on the countryside for food, and always suspicious of peasant motivations, increasingly saw such disruption as part of the aristocratic plot itself – for any trouble threatened the fragile supply-lines that brought grain to the cities. Town-dwellers formed militias, and waited anxiously for news from the men they had sent to the Estates at Versailles.
What played out over the summer months of 1789 was partly a violent confrontation – nowhere clearer than in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July – but also a strange mixture of dread and euphoria, as even many of the feared aristocrats came to be swept up in the idea of change.
On 4 August, in a bid to appease the restless peasantry, the first suggestion was made in the National Assembly (as the Estates-General had rebaptised itself in June) to end the various exactions that privileged lords could claim, by time-honoured right, from farmers’ harvests. The result a few hours later was a commitment to total civic equality, born of a “combat of generosity”, a “bountiful example of magnanimity and disinterestedness”. This spirit was expressed still more vividly later in August, in the voting “for all men and for all countries” of a Declaration of the Rights of Man.
From this euphoric peak, however, the only way was down. Within the year, those whose power was being directly challenged by the transformations of 1789 had coalesced into an overt ‘Counter-revolution’, and the links of this aristocratic grouping to the other powers of Europe fuelled a rising paranoia among revolutionaries, until a war to cleanse France’s frontiers of threat seemed the only way forward.
War was declared on Austria in April 1792, with Prussia entering the conflict shortly afterwards. An army wracked by dissent between ‘patriotic’ troops and ‘aristocratic’ officers (many of whom had already deserted to the counter-revolution) produced a string of military disasters. The conviction among Parisian radicals that royal treason was behind this led them to bring down the monarchy with armed force on 10  August 1792.
Newly-republican French armies rallied to save the country from defeat, but France moved inexorably towards the horrors of civil war and state terror, the revolutionary political class clawing at itself in furious division. Even amid such internal conflict, the spirit of free citizenship and newfound republicanism inspired continued prodigies of military effort. France went to war with Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and the Italian states from early 1793, plunging Europe into a generation of conflict.

Suffocated hopes

The true tragedy of this descent was that it suffocated all the international hopes of 1789. Americans found themselves forced to choose sides, with enmity towards either Britain or France a key component of the vicious factional politics reigning in the United States by the later 1790s.
Britain, where Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man had tried to bring the message of the American and French Revolutions home, saw assaults on freedoms such as habeas corpus and public assembly. The claims of the lower orders for a share of power were assimilated, in the words of one 1794 statute, to “a traitorous and detestable Conspiracy... for introducing the System of Anarchy and Confusion which has so fatally prevailed in France”.
Real revolt broke out in Ireland in 1798, fomented by exaggerated hopes of French intervention and exacerbated by the brutality of an establishment wedded to a view of the Catholic peasantry as little better than beasts. Thirty thousand died in months of savage repression. Napoleon Bonaparte, also in 1798, tried to take the war to Britain in the East, and the chaotic failure of his Egyptian expedition did not prevent him from ascending first to dictatorship the next year, and to an imperial throne in 1804. By then he had already, in 1803, broken a short-lived peace with Britain, and for the following decade was to pursue a relentless policy of expansion.

_{Napoleon Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole, 1796. His campaigns were to transform the map of Europe. (Bridgeman Art Library)}
The unwillingness of the other powers to fully accept Napoleon’s legitimacy was one factor in this, but the emperor’s own determination to have dominance at almost any cost was itself a reason for that intransigent opposition. Together, they made for a spiral of warfare that criss-crossed Europe from Lisbon to Moscow, until the final insane Russia campaign of 1812 turned the tide.
Napoleon was driven back within French borders, abdicating in 1814 before returning the next year for a last hurrah at Waterloo. His final fate, to be held on the island of Saint Helena thousands of miles from Europe, reflects ironically on the power of the individual liberated by the events of 1789. Where the revolutionaries had hoped to create the conditions for the rise of free individuals everywhere, they gave power to one such man, someone so extraordinary he had to end his days like a character in a Greek myth, chained to a rock.
Napoleon’s legacy was to ensure that revolution would always be viewed through the lens of war. Abandoning a universalist rhetoric – and reinstating the colonial slavery his more radical predecessors had abolished in 1794 – the emperor of the French later claimed to have had a vision of a Europe of Nations, where Spaniards, Italians, Germans and Poles could live free of aristocratic tyranny.
Since he actually created an empire that stretched from Hamburg to Genoa, and client-kingdoms for his relations around its edges, there is little reason to take this claim seriously. That he thought it worth making, however, shows how central the new question of nationality would be, as the troubled generations to come wrestled yet again with the question of who was entitled to be free.

 

History Trivia - storming of the Bastille

July 14

 664 Deusdedit of Canterbury, the first native-born holder of the see of Canterbury died. An Anglo-Saxon, he became archbishop in 655 and held the office until his death, probably from the plague.

1430 Joan of Arc, taken prisoner by the Burgundians in May, was handed over to Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais.

1789 The Bastille, a fortress in Paris used to hold political prisoners, was stormed by a mob, beginning of the French Revolution.

History Trivia - Queen Marie Antoinette beheaded during the French Revolution.

On October 16

 456 Magister militum (Master of the Soldiers) Flavius Ricimer defeated Emperor Avitus at Piacenza and became master of the Western Roman Empire. Ricimer was the first German who became a virtual king of Italy.

1551 Edward Seymour Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of England during the minority reign of Edward VI was re-arrested. He was executed for felony in January 1552 after scheming to overthrow John Dudley's (Earl of Warwick) regime.

1555 The Protestant martyrs Bishop Hugh Latimer and Bishop Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake for heresy in England.

1793 Queen Marie Antoinette was beheaded during the French Revolution.