The man whose historical fiction has made him one of the twenty best-selling authors of the past decade remains bluntly modest. For Bernard Cornwell, writing remains a job like any other – his first books were written so that he could continue living in the US without a Green Card, and he claims to be unconcerned with writing ‘literature’ as opposed to “keeping people up at night”. He’s emphatic in reminding people that he is not a historian, and is particularly riled by dons who take issue with the occasional fictional embellishment.
Instead, he describes his preference for historical settings as being motivated by a long-held love of an older generation of historical novelists – C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series looms large, along with the novels of George McDonald Fraser. He even goes so far as to conclude that this was a given at birth: in describing meeting his mother for the first time, he talks of “[walking] into her flat in Basingstoke: everywhere you looked, there were historical novels. I think it’s that gene which came straight down.”
Discussion of his upbringing, however, reveals a more complicated picture than that childhood love of Hornblower may suggest. His adopted parents were members of the Peculiar People, an obscure Christian sect highly influenced by seventeenth century dissenters. “If you had dropped my adopted father into the world of the Pilgrim Fathers he would have been totally at home. They had exactly the same beliefs.”
Yet when Cornwell tells me that his childhood was spent “surrounded by history”, he is referring not to this world but to the Essex village in which he grew up: “I absolutely loved it,” he says, going on to describe the treasured artefacts kept in the local church. History “was a refuge from the Peculiar People. Although I did think later on that it was unusual to have been brought up in a 17th Century mindset.”
The Peculiar People were also pacifists, contrasting neatly with Cornwell’s obvious love for – and knowledge of – military history. Although he admits to being bored with its often “Roman numeral”-heavy approach, an ongoing fascination with what he describes as “soldiers and soldiering” appears to run through his life. He once considered joining the army, and spent several years working for the BBC in Northern Ireland “at the height of the Troubles”.
I ask whether experiencing conflict personally influenced him when he turned to writing. “I’m sure it has. I can remember writing a bomb going off in one of the books, and remembering what it looks like, what it feels like… To watch any bomb going off is a horrible, horrible experience.” When writing battle scenes, he says he feels as if he were leading an imaginary camera crew, reacting to events as they happen. “The point of view is very often the point of view of a character. And I guess that does come from working in the Troubles. You do think in terms of camera angles.”
Beyond this, however, Cornwell claims to view the Troubles in very different terms from the more distant conflicts which have formed the backbone of his writing – the Napoleonic era of the Sharpe series, or the American Revolutionary period of his current novel The Fort. He says that many of these have preoccupied him since childhood, though there are exceptions. Agincourt grew purely from a fascination with “the whole archer thing, the whole longbow thing”. His confidence in new subjects appears relatively undimmed: he ends the interview by stating confidently his desire to “do a Tudor novel.” I mention that that the Tudors seem currently in vogue. He agrees, adding “ah, but I have an idea…”
