I’m always on the lookout for the early 1700s. Sometimes it’s the thrill of spotting a view that can’t have changed much since the early eighteenth century, sometimes it’s coming across a building that was standing when my fictional heroine was baptised in 1689. In museums I’m drawn to objects from the past, because they help me so much with the process of imaginative reconstruction. A court cupboard in the museum at Saffron Walden, for example, once belonged to Sir Francis Weston, one of those accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn: seeing it made my skin prickle (this is what Hilary Mantel does in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, make distant history as vivid as the sandwich you had for lunch). Okay, the cupboard is much earlier than the period my novel is set in, but superficially at least it’s not so different from the furniture well-to-do people owned in the early eighteenth century – heavy, glossy, elaborately carved, and designed to impress as well as be useful. I have a powerful urge to run my hands over it, but there are people around and I don’t want to set off the security alarm, besides which I’d look utterly weird.
I’m back in Saffron Walden on Saturday for the annual sale at the Fry Art Gallery when I spot this blue plaque to the designer Henry Winstanley. Winstanley was the son of the steward at Audley End, the grand country house just outside the town, and he built the first Eddystone Lighthouse. Sadly, he was carrying out repairs to the building when the Great Storm of 1703 struck, destroying the lighthouse and Winstanley with it.
The specificity of the date, 1703, is especially pleasing, since that’s the year my novel is set. I reflect that it’s as though time loops and circles back on itself, like the hawks at the opening of Bring Up the Bodies, which show us how Thomas Cromwell’s past is likely to shape his future. I’ve been interested in the Great Storm for a long while, and it features heavily in my novel. Now it turns out one of its most famous victims lived a stone’s throw (a falcon’s swoop?) from where I was working when I wrote A Pair of Sharp Eyes. Three hundred and sixteen years suddenly don’t seem that many – three long lifetimes end to end, is all.
