Whether or not there was a church on the site of St Lawrence Jewry in London before the Norman period is unknown, but it is a plausible location for one of the lost churches of Roman London. St Lawrence Jewry has endured successive destructions, most recently by German bombing on the night of 29 December 1940, in the same raid that produced the famous image of the dome of St Paul’s rising miraculously above the devastation. The bombing was watched from the roof of the Air Ministry by Air Vice Marshal ‘Bomber’ Harris, who famously remarked that ‘they have sown the wind’; thus was born the British bomber offensive against Germany. In the City, air was sucked into the vacuum created as the fires consumed oxygen and hot air rose, creating violent winds which fuelled the fires further and spread burning debris. The account of St Lawrence Jewry shrieking that night is true: a soldier on leave who had been an organmaker recognized the noise of hot air rushing through the pipes. Unexploded German ordnance such as the SC250 bomb still lies under London, and the Royal Navy Fleet Diving Squadron bomb disposal teams are called out frequently to deal with discoveries such as the fictional bomb in this novel.
Almost three centuries earlier the medieval church had been destroyed in another firestorm, ‘a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like an ordinary fire’, as Samuel Pepys described it in his diary of 2 September 1666. And sixteen hundred years before that, the newly laid-out town of Londinium, created soon after Claudius’ conquest, had been laid waste by the forces of Boudica, the warrior queen, who razed the buildings and slaughtered the inhabitants during a terrible rampage in AD 60 or 61. There is no surviving description of the sack of London, but in the estuary of the Thames had been seen a frightful vision: ‘the Ocean had appeared blood-red… the ebbing tide had left behind what looked to be human corpses’ (Tacitus, Annals xiv, 32).
The Roman historian Dio Cassius wrote that Boudica’s followers exacted their retribution to the accompaniment of sacrifices in their sacred places, particularly ‘the grove of Andate’ – probably the same as Andraste, who Boudica herself invokes in a speech – who they regarded ‘with the most exceptional reverence’ (lxii, 7). As for Boudica, after her death following the final battle against the Romans, ‘the Britons mourned her deeply and gave her a costly burial’. The location of this burial has been sought ever since, but it is possible that both the tomb and the ‘grove of Andate’ lie somewhere under modern London. The fictional tomb in this novel incorporates features from actual Iron Age discoveries in England, including the chariot burial, the horse iconography of the Iceni, Boudica’s tribe, and the golden neck torque – ‘a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace’ (Dio Cassius lxii, 2.4). The decorated bronze cylinder is based on one actually found in a chariot burial in Yorkshire. Some of the artefacts described in the novel can be seen in the British Museum, including a row of Roman wine amphoras from an Iron Age burial at Sheepen and the magnificent Battersea Shield, found on the bed of the river Thames.
Apart from the tomb and the gladiators’ chamber, the picture of archaeology in the Guildhall Yard owes much to actual finds. You can go underground and visit the remains of the Roman amphitheatre, discovered in 1988; and beneath the restored Church of St Lawrence Jewry lies a vaulted burial chamber, forgotten since the seventeenth century and discovered by chance in 1998. It contains the only surviving part of the medieval church. As these extraordinary discoveries show, underground London may continue to harbour untold secrets. Much of this can be appreciated in the marvellous displays and publications of the Museum of London, which has overseen many excavations during the regeneration of the City following the bomb damage of the Second World War.
This rich archaeological potential was recognized during the rebuilding following the Great Fire of 1666, when Sir Christopher Wren recorded a Roman road and other remains during his rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral and the City Churches. Wren did indeed employ the four craftsmen mentioned in the novel, Edward Pierce, mason, Thomas Newman, bricklayer, John Longland, carpenter, and Thomas Mead, plasterer, all of whom worked on the rebuilding of St Lawrence Jewry in 1671-80. Johannes Deverette is fictional, though his Huguenot background is plausible at this period; the wording of his will is based on Sir Christopher Wren’s Will, which can be seen at the National Archives website. Wren did have a mentally disabled child, Billy, and the idea that Wren himself may have found Gregorian music appealing springs from his own documented sympathies for another age ‘… in which holy mothers and maids singing divine songs, offering the pure incense of their prayers, reading, meditating and conversing of holy things, spend almost all day in the company of God and his angels’ (recorded by his son Christopher in Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, 1750, p. 195, and quoted further here in Chapter 18).
The fictional character of Deverette’s descendent John Everett draws inspiration from the lives of my great grandfather, Arthur Everett Gibbins (1877-1956), and his brother Norman (1882-1956). They were from a Huguenot family, based in Lawrence Lane, London, overlooking the church of St Lawrence Jewry in the heart of the City; their grandfather Samuel Gibbins had been Master of the Carpenters’ Company and a Common Councillor of the City of London, working in the Guildhall. Arthur followed his father John and became an architect, but shortly before the First World War he left his young family and went to America, never to return. He had been Anglo-Catholic, but converted to Roman Catholicism before his departure. He became a US citizen and lived out the remainder of his life in California, where he spent his final years in Santa Paula playing organ, singing Gregorian chant and doing odd jobs for a convent, whose nuns looked after him. He never saw his family again.
For years Arthur had managed a remote estate in the mountains above Santa Paula, and in the first part of his life he and his father had designed and built country villas in southern England. I have a plan of one of those houses, St Mark’s Parsonage in Kemp Town, Brighton, from The Building News of 1 March 1889 (John George Gibbins, F.R.I.B.A., architect), showing a facade with the alternating courses of bricks and stone so characteristic of Roman construction. As an architecture student Arthur would have known of the Roman villas then being discovered and excavated in Britain. His cousin Henry de Beltgens Gibbins, an economic historian, wrote in his bestselling Industry in Britain (1897) about seeing traces of these villas, ‘with their Italian inner courts, colonnades and tessellated pavements’. Henry was interested in the relationship of these villas to the landscape, and Arthur may have shared that fascination too. In a fold of the Cotswold hills, not very far from Warwick School where Arthur was educated, is Chedworth – my favourite Romano-British villa – where the layout and vista from the buildings seems perfectly attuned to the landscape, outward-looking by contrast with the enclosed splendour of the great Italian houses such as the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.
Arthur’s brother Norman was a ‘wrangler’ at Cambridge University, achieving first class honours in mathematics, and later became a school headmaster, a published mathematician and a prominent figure in British chess. In 1915 he was commissioned into the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and was severely wounded near Loos on the Western Front in June of the following year. In April his battalion had been devastated by a German gas attack at Hulluch, one of the worst gas attacks of the war. During his recuperation he worked as a cipher officer in Room 108 of the War Office in London, encoding and decoding telegrams. While he was there, in January 1917, the famous Zimmerman Telegram – revealing German plans to attack America – was decoded in the nearby Room 40 of the Admiralty Building. One of the codebreakers was the Rev. William Montgomery, translator of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910). Montgomery’s visit to America in my novel is fictional, though plausible given the great interest by the US in British decryption work at the time. The decoding of the Zimmerman Telegram was one of the greatest intelligence coups in history, the single act that brought the United States into the First World War.