Dark Fire

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 Anne of Cleves and take Catherine for a fifth wife, Cromwell was caught in a trap. He had previously helped the king rid himself of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, but a Howard queen would inevitably mean a challenge both to his power and to reform. Perhaps, as Shardlake speculates, if Cromwell had helped the king to a divorce he might, just, have saved himself – he had escaped from tight corners before – but he tried to keep the Cleves marriage alive and this was probably the final straw for the king.

Nonetheless, the dramatic suddenness of his arrest at the council table on 10 June 1540 on obviously trumped-up charges of treason surprised contemporaries and has puzzled historians. My story of the Greek Fire fraud as a final nail in Cromwell's coffin is, of course, entirely imaginary, but it fills a gap. Everybody, including Sir Richard Rich, turned their coats; Secretary Grey is a fictitious character, but there must have been many like him.

Thomas Cromwell was executed on 28 July 1540. Henry divorced Anne of Cleves, who was happy enough to escape marriage to her terrifying husband, and married Catherine Howard in secret the day after Cromwell's execution – a marriage that only a year later was to end in yet another gruesome tragedy.

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 Channel 4 Television showed a documentary, Machines Time Forgot, Fireship (2003) in which Professor John Haldon of Birmingham University successfully re-created Greek Fire and the apparatus that fired it. I have modelled the apparatus and the formula in Dark Fire on his reconstruction, and I am grateful to him and to the programme.

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.