Dark Fire

HISTORICAL NOTE

By the summer of 1540, the hottest of the sixteenth century, Thomas Cromwell's position as Henry VIII's chief minister was under threat. The king had repudiated Rome and declared himself head of the Church eight years before and had at first welcomed reformist measures. The dissolution of the monasteries, master-minded by Cromwell, had brought him vast wealth and Henry had allowed Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer much latitude in ending Latin ceremonies and printing the Bible in English for the first time.

By the late 1530s, however, the tide was turning. Henry's i

England, moreover, was now isolated in Europe and the pope was urging the main Catholic powers, France and Spain, to unite and reconquer the heretical island for Roman Catholicism. There was genuine fear of invasion and huge sums were spent in training young men in arms, fortifying the south coast, and building up the navy.

Cromwell sought to strengthen both reform at home and England's military position abroad by marrying the king (a widower since his third wife Jane Seymour's death in childbirth in 1537) to a princess from one of the states associated with the German Protestant League. However, his choice, A

Meanwhile the king, aged nearly fifty, had become infatuated with Catherine Howard, the teenage niece of the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk headed the religious conservatives at court and had long been Cromwell's most dangerous enemy. When the king sought to divorce the newly married A

Nonetheless, the dramatic sudde

Thomas Cromwell was executed on 28 July 1540. Henry divorced A

The return to Rome, however, did not happen. For the rest of his reign Henry governed without a chief minister, playing one faction off against another. A year after Cromwell's execution he was complaining that he had been tricked into sacrificing 'the most faithful councillor I ever had'. In time the Duke of Norfolk too fell from grace.

Greek Fire was, it is believed, a compound of petroleum and certain wood resins. This primitive flame-thrower was discovered, as related in the book, in seventh-century Constantinople and was used to great effect by the Byzantines against the Arab navies. The secret of its construction was passed down from one Byzantine emperor to another and in due course was lost, though the memory of this astounding weapon lingered on among scholars.

Of course, even if the method of construction and propulsion had been rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, it is unlikely it could ever have been used since petroleum was an unknown substance there and all potential sources, from the Black Sea to the Middle East and North Africa, were under the control of the expanding Ottoman empire, with which Europe, weakened by political and now religious disunity, was in a state of internecine warfare throughout the sixteenth century. In time Western Europe recovered and rose to a new pre-eminence; together with America it developed weapons compared to which Greek Fire is a mere plaything.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for Dark Fire took me to some widely varied sources. While I was in the early stages of writing this book, by great good fortune Cha

I am indebted to a number of books on Tudor London, most especially Liza Picard's Elizabeth's London (Weidenfeld amp; Nicolson, 2003) as well as Gamini Salgado's The Elizabethan Underworld (Sovereign, 1977). John Schofield's Medieval London Houses (Yale University Press, 1995) and John Stow's Survey of London (first published 1598; reprinted 1999, Guernsey Press Co.) took me back to the houses and streets of the Tudor City. The A-Z of Elizabethan London (Harry Margary, 1979) enabled me to follow my characters from place to place.

Sir John H. Baker's monumental Introduction to English Legal History (Butterworths, 1971) was invaluable on the legal side; Adrie

I am grateful to James Dewar of the Lincoln's I

While I was in the early stages of researching this book I was involved in a serious road accident. My heartfelt thanks go to a number of people without whose help and encouragement I doubt the book would have been finished anything like on time. First of all to Mike Holmes and Tony Macaulay for their advice to a scientific illiterate on how the fraud on Cromwell could actually have been carried out. Without their aid I would have been completely at sea. Thanks particularly to Mike for guiding me to the conclusion that there was nothing around at the time that would have made a credible substitute for petroleum, and to Tony for the idea of the vodka.