Read The French Executioner Online
Authors: C.C. Humphreys
The French Executioner
The French Executioner:
‘Falling somewhere between the novels of Bernard Cornwell and Wilbur Smith, C. C. Humphreys has fashioned a rollicking good
yarn that keeps the pages turning from start to finish’
John Daly,
Irish Examiner
‘A
brilliant,
brutal and absorbing historical thriller on the real-life figure of Jean Rombaud, the man who beheaded Anne Boleyn … The
experience of Humphreys as a playwright, fight choreographer and actor are all evident here. It is cut and thrust all the
way, with dazzling duels, bruising battles and moments of terror following each other at a breathless pace’
Steve Craggs,
Northern Echo
‘… how he fulfills his mission is told with enormous zest in this splendid, rip-roaring story … a fine addition to the tradition
of swashbuckling costume romance of which Robert Louis Stevenson is the incomparable master’
George Patrick,
Hamilton Examiner
‘…an entertaining read – a charming page-turner’
David Evans,
Edmonton Journal
‘Lightning paced’
Barry Forshaw,
Publishing News
‘There were lots of things to learn in it, historical things which were very well observed. It’s good fun’
Anna Raeburn’s Pick of the Paperbacks,
Open Book,
Radio 4
‘Humphreys has spun a thrilling yarn that gallops across France, Germany and Italy’
Sally Zigmond,
Historical Novels Society Reviews
HE
F
RENCH
E
XECUTIONER
C.C. HUMPHREYS
The idea for this story first came to me as I worked out in a gym in Vancouver, Canada, in 1993. I was doing a shoulder press,
facing a mirror and studying my form. This internal dialogue followed:
(Lift weight) ‘God, I’ve got a long neck.’
(Lower) ‘If ever I was to be beheaded, my neck would be a really easy target for an axe.’
(Lift) ‘Or a sword. Anne Boleyn was executed with a sword.’
(Lower) ‘Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand.’
The seed was sown, and it soon sprouted. I wrote a short story, a little horror piece that required no research. I worked
on it for about a week, then abandoned it. I had already written one play which had won a local competition and I was about
to be commissioned to write another. A third was to follow. I was, just barely, a playwright. No way was I a novelist. That
was too big a mountain to climb.
Other images came to me over the next few years, other fantasies (I remember yelling ‘Fugger!’ at my surprised wife on an
island once). We moved to London, England, where I’d grown up. My career as an actor waxed and waned. I toyed with a fourth
play. Then, in a cottage in Shropshire in the autumn of 1998, I realised why this most recent play wasn’t working. It wasn’t
the story I needed to tell. I needed to tell the story of Anne Boleyn’s executioner.
I researched for about a month. I’d bought books over the years that I thought would be useful if I ever came to write the
novel, but had never read them. I read them now.
Reformation Europe
by G. R. Elton I’d studied before at A level and it gave me the background, along with
War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450–1620
by J. R. Hale.
A World Lit Only by Fire
by William Manchester was wonderful on mindset and sixteenth-century smells.
Religion and the Decline of Magic
by Keith Thomas reminded me how very different people’s beliefs were the best part of half a millennium ago, in a world where
magic was ever present.
The Galleys at Lepanto
by Jack Beeching taught me battle tactics and slave conditions.
When the month was up I decided that, though I needed to learn a lot more, what I needed most was my characters to start telling
me their stories. After twenty-three years as an actor I was grounded in Motivation: Why does he want to do this? What stops
him achieving it? How does he feel then? What does she want now, and who is stopping her getting it? It’s the same writing
plays – objectives running into obstacles create action.
The great thing about a minor figure in history is that no one knows much about him. I discovered that Anne Boleyn’s executioner
was named Jean Rombaud, that he lived in St Omer near Calais, that he killed with a sword – far quicker and cleaner than the
axe, and so the kindest stroke in a brutal world – and that Henry VIII paid a great deal of money to bring him over as a final
favour to his soon-to-be ex-wife. That was all there was to know about him.
Anne, of course, was different. Many books have been written about her, who she was, what she did. She was important. Without
her, Elizabeth would never have been born and England might still be a Catholic country. Nearly everyone I asked had heard
of Anne Boleyn. And nearly half of them knew she had a six-fingered hand.
So I began with a rough cast of characters, ideas of their
journeys through the novel, a few images. I love film, the power of a striking visual. As a young reader I always loved epics,
the more adventurous the better. I decided that since this was my novel I would put into it everything I loved. I have always
been a storyteller, so many of my characters are too. I was my school’s sabre champion at sixteen; I became an actor so that
I could leap around with swords. In Canada, I became a fight choreographer in theatre. So I wanted lots of swashbuckling and
derring-do. Battleaxes and slingshots and scimitars. I like visionaries, kaleidoscopes and altered states of consciousness.
Fortunately, I found my research dovetailing almost perfectly with these imaginative desires. I was writing an adventure,
not an historical document, but it all seemed possible. And who
really
knows what happened back then anyway?
Here are a few examples of my images and ideas coinciding with character and history (and one example where it didn’t quite
and I kept it in anyway).
The Fuggers
They truly were the greatest banking family in Europe. They bought the Emperor-ship for Charles V. And bankers did have their
hands chopped off by vengeful, bankrupt knights.
Haakon
I am half Norwegian and I love the sagas, so I had to have a Viking figure. I have also studied the runes, the Norse system
of divination. I have one of Haakon’s runes – UR – tattooed, uh, somewhere on my person. And I wore a silver axe around my
neck for about fifteen years.
Beck
I love Shakespeare, women dressed as men. I also played a Jewish zealot in the Biblical-Roman TV epic
A.D.
– Anno Domini. I am probably the only member of British Actors Equity who knows how to use a slingshot. And since you still
see them used today, in news footage of riots from Jerusalem, why not in 1536? (I still have my slingshot.)
Giancarlo Cibo
Entirely made up, and I’m probably libelling the Archbishop of the time as well as Pope Alexander whose bastard son Cibo
could not have been. But I needed a
debauched, Borgia-like prelate and I always wanted to go to Siena. So, for my second draft I did and rewrote accordingly.
Dancing a galliard
The captain of a galley did dance a galliard going into battle, except it happened at Lepanto in 1571.
St Anthony’s Fire
I have long been fascinated by this phenomenon. The last recorded instance of this mass hallucination was in the eighteenth
century – or so I thought. Then I found a book called
The Day of St Anthony’s Fire
by John G. Fuller which described in detail the hallucinogenic horrors that swept over a town called Pont-Sainte-Esprit in
France in 1951. The poisoning is caused by ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and from which LSD is derived. Eating ergot-infected
bread was like taking ten or more doses of LSD.
Kaleidoscopes
The idea of a Black Mass within one within a dungeon was a wonderful image. But my editor wishes me to point out that kaleidoscopes
weren’t invented until 1816. Then again, modern research is showing that Caravaggio must have used camera lenses to paint
his hyper-realist paintings in 1600, so there!
Finally, a definite example of wrong history. The siege of the Anabaptists in Munster took place in 1535, six months before
the death of Anne Boleyn. But when I read about Jan Bockelson I remembered watching live on television the tragic events at
Waco, Texas, in 1993 and learning of the messianic madness of David Koresh. And as they say in journalism, never let the facts
get in the way of a good story. Their sacred texts and the hymn I quote I got from a religious encyclopedia at the British
Library. All genuine Munster Anabaptist. Fortunately, they were as obsessed by resurrection as I needed them to be.
There are many more incidents in the novel that come from my fascinations or, in some cases, my experiences. I would be happy
to answer any questions on them. For now, though, I’d like to end by thanking some people without whom I would not have written
this novel. All women, strangely. Or perhaps not.
Firstly, there is my wife, Aletha, who encouraged me when I began, pushed me when I faltered and forgave the odd peculiarity
of behaviour in the name of research. The time when she came home to discover me leaping around the hall with an umbrella
trying to behead imaginary chickens comes to mind.
Next, my wonderful agent, Anthea Morton-Saner at Curtis Brown, who took me on because of this novel and has proved again and
again the truth of the old dictum: Get an agent!
I’d also like to thank Jane Wood, publishing director at Orion, who turned my fantasy into reality and made me believe that
I might have more than one book in me by giving me an advance for two.
Penultimately, there’s Rachel Leyshon, my editor, who not only will drink beer with me but whose penetrating notes and brilliant
eye guided me on my final edit to help me achieve my true vision, and whose enthusiasm for the story continually reassured
this self-critical newcomer.
Finally, there’s one person without whom nothing would be possible. Anne Boleyn. She must have been quite extraordinary. I
hope I’ve done her justice. And whoever it is who places a bunch of white roses on her tombstone in the chapel of St Peter
ad Vincula in the Tower of London every 19 May, the anniversary of her death, I would like to thank them too.
Hoch! Hoch!
C. C. Humphreys
London, February 2001
For Aletha
Praise for The French Executioner:
Five: To The Victor, The Spoils
Eight: At The Sign Of The Comet
Seven: The Scattering Of The Quest
T
HE
V
OW
ONE
T
HE
G
IBBET
It was unseasonably cold for a late May night, but the gibbet’s former occupant was too dead to care and his replacement too
unconscious. It was the three men-at-arms who grumbled about it, and though the removal of the skeleton from the torso-shaped
cage required some strenuous snapping and pulling, they were not grateful for the warmth of the exercise. With their prisoner
finally wedged in and the cage’s key replaced on its hook, they returned to their horses. Pressing themselves against the
warm flanks, the soldiers brushed the gibbet’s leavings from their cloaks, and grumbled still.
‘Such a beautiful night.’ The voice came silky and warm from beneath folds of cloak and fur, the breath a steady stream into
the frosty air. ‘Look, a comet! In Siena we’d say: there’s another virginity gone.’
There was a laugh, as silken as the voice, followed by a cough. A piece of red cloth dabbed at the lips.
Heinrich von Solingen turned towards the man who had just spoken, the man whose every command he obeyed. Heinrich was confused.
He liked things ordered and simple. They had got what His Holiness wanted. Wrapped in velvet, it rested now in His Holiness’s
saddle bags. Confusion made him angry and bold enough to question.