Jane Hardstaff
About Author
Jane Hardstaff longed to be an artist, but somehow became a TV producer. She grew up in Wiltshire with her brothers, hunting mayfly-nymphs with her father and reading fairytales with her mother. Now she lives in Londons East End, near the great, wild River Thames the inspiration for her first book.
Interview
THE EXECUTIONER'S DAUGHTER
EGMONT BOOKS
FEBRUARY 2014
It is Tudor England and Henry VIII is on the throne, married to Anne Boleyn. This is the time when more people are executed at the Tower than at any other. Moss and her father live in the Tower of London: he is the Tower's executioner and it is her job to help him!
This vivid and adventurous historical fiction story explores life at the Tower during this period and gives an evocative portrait of London at the time as well as introducing real historical characters into the fictional story.
Author Jane Hardstaff, who works in television production, hadn't set out to write an historical book, despite a deep interest in history and much time spent at ancient burial sites in Wiltshire as a child. She says, "The idea for this story came as a random daydream I had while I was walking by the river one day. I walked up to the Tower of London and wondered what it was like to be the executioner at the Tower and then what it might have been like to be the child of the executioner?
As the story begins, Moss, the executioner's daughter, is beginning to rebel against her father's role at the Tower. Hardstaff says, "I wanted to explore her relationship with her father; he does something she hates and he expects her to go along with it. Moss hasn't been brutalised by her upbringing though, part of her still wants nothing to do with her father's work, and I wondered what it would be like to be the daughter of that man?"
In the story, Moss is charged with picking up the heads of those who have just been executed but in reality this was probably the job of the executioner, who would chop off the head and show it to the crowd says Hardstaff. During her research for the book, she discovered that this wasn't just to show the dead person had died, but to show the dead person the crowd AND its own headless body. "I found out other things, like the executioner was paid by the person he was about to execute, a tip to give them a good death. There are lots of accounts of botched beheadings, either because someone struggled or because the executioner wasn't very good." The numbers of people who would have come to see executions was also very large; executions were popular, like a day out, and Hardstaff works hard to give the setting an authenticity using this kind of detail.
Hardstaff also gives us lively descriptions of the forge and kitchens at the Tower and the places she describes, including the Great Hall and the Bell Tower where Thomas Moore was incarcerated before his execution, existed - as did the path the executioner would have trod up Tower Hill.
In this story Moss meets King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Hardstaff admits that the meeting with Anne Boleyn is very unlikely. However, while chance encounters are made up, the dates in the story are recorded dates of real historical events.
Hardstaff is fascinated by the character of Anne Boleyn. "What I wanted to do was to explore a an aspect of the character of Anne Boleyn that is very difficult to get to if you just look at the historical events. I read first hand accounts of her life, such as those by the Spanish Ambassador, but you have to remember that everyone who mentions Anne has an agenda and you have to read between the lines of what they have written about her; the Ambassador didn't want Henry to divorce Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne. So the real Anne is a bit of a mystery.
"I combine what I read about her with the idea of what life might have been like for her at the Court. She was very educated, she could hunt, shoot and play cards and was a strong independent woman. She is a fascinating character in history. The Tudors were like 'celebrities' are to us today and her family rose so fast and fell so swiftly; it's like celebrities today and how newspapers build them up and then crash them down and, like the executions then, we follow it all guiltily."
There is also a fantasy element in the book which Hardstaff says draws on how people of the time were naturally superstitious of the river and its currents and would have invented myths and stories to explain its behaviour. Alongside the historical detail we have the emergence of the Riverwitch, an idea that was inspired by the spirits, ghosts and devils used then to explain natural phenomena.
"I have always been interested in watery places and what lurks below the surface; my dad was a biology teacher and we would go off to rivers and waters and look for hidden creatures and my imagination was fed on things we don't know are there. I was keen for the atmosphere of this book to have its roots in the unexplained."
She adds, "I have a very clear sense of myself at that age, nine or ten years, and it was a part of my life when things were really vivid and I do like fantasy, stories with magic and legends and fairy tales. When I came to writing something, I knew I wanted an aspect of the supernatural."
The Riverwitch emerges as a ghostly character who would pull children to their deaths under the water. The Thames was a truly dangerous river, then as now, and London Bridge was the most dangerous part of the river. At that time, there were 20 arches across the length of the bridge and the water would flow very fast at the arches; Hardstaff discovered that there was said to be a six-foot drop at the arches when the river was in full flow and the currents could quickly suck people down. Parts of London Bridge frequently fell into the river hence the song 'London Bridge is falling down' - and in the book we see the loo or privy falling into the river, something based on real life with a subsequent loss of life.
The children at that time often had difficult lives and Hardstaff explores the fact of their homelessness and the way some children were forced to live and struggled to survive, although she believes today's children are "pretty well versed" in the hardships that children would have faced in the past. "The parts of the book we needed to be more careful about in terms of descriptions was the executions and how to describe those. There are also scenes with a character called the Ragged Man and children being given to the 'Riverwitch' that were difficult to write, Hardstaff adds.
Hardstaff is already writing a sequel to The Executioner's Daughter which will also be set at this time with the same atmosphere and fiction threaded through with the lives of real historical people. The second book picks up on Moss's life some 18 months after they leave the Tower. Moss finds she has to go back to London where she discovers a brutal underworld being operated from the Beast House at the Tower, which would later become the menagerie where the royal animals were kept. It also takes us to the Isle of Dogs which was a marsh area back in Tudor times. The second book also brings in real historical characters, including Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who is four and a half at the time.
Hardstaff says she is fascinated by Tudor London and would love to visit the era in order to cross London Bridge and to visit for a day. "I would love to be able to walk the whole of London in a day but I'd quite likely be robbed along the way!."
