In my novel I kill off Percy Kirke early on!  The reason being that he was an evil, brutal individual. His son, also called Percy, will be making an entrance in book 6.

Samuel Pepys is often referred to as the Father of the English Navy.  Mind you, he was not adversed to ‘bedding’ the wives of officers looking for advancement!

Percy Kirke was a professional soldier, who had served under Turenne, and with John Churchill (later the Duke of Marlborough) who was affectionately known as ‘Corporal John’ because, despite being of noble birth, had joined the army as a raw recruit and rose through the ranks.   Kirke served with the Duke of Monmouth and the legendary D’Artagnan, Captain of the famous French Musketeers at Maastricht in 1673. I imagine many of you thought that D’Artagnan was a fictious character dreamt up by Dumas - far from it - he lived!    With the help of the Duke of York (the future James II) Kirke was commissioned “Ensign in a new raised company in the Admiral’s Regiment” (the yellow-coated regiment from which todays Royal Marines originated), Sr.Chichester Wrey, Col., Tho. Bromley, Capt., commission signed in Whitehall, July 7, 1666. Kirke rose through the ranks to Lt.-Colonel in his brother-in-law’s regiment of horse (the Earl of Oxford’s Troop in the Royal Horse Guards known as “the Blues”).   From here he was promoted to Colonel of the Tangier Regiment of foot in 1680.

Kirke was reputedly a drunken brute who commanded a drunken regiment, but this reputation might be somewhat exaggerated (but not in my novel!).   In book two of ‘The Adventures of Michael Fane’ we meet Samuel Pepys who was living on Tangiers at this time, and although he was no prude the deepest impression he leaves on the reader of his Journal is disgust at the gross indecency and lurching loutishness of Kirke and his men. The endless dirty stories of the Governor’s table-talk passed from the distasteful to the unendurable. In Pepys’s view Kirke’s manners and morals were reflected in the cruelty and corruption of his administration. There were ugly stories of soldiers beaten to death with no pretence of legality: of Jewish refugees returned to the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition because they could not raise the bribes that Kirke demanded: of rape and robbery and bullying of the citizens and their wives. Kirke personified what Pepys called “the bestiality of this place”.  I do not exagerate when I list the punishments that Kirke dished out during the ‘Bloody Assize’. He enjoyed slicing the ears off a victim and then repeatedly asking questions which the poor soul could not hear.  He would then gut them and leave them hanging on a tree.

His favourite and most barbaric act was to ‘hack and sack’ - this meant that the victim would be delimbed by axe and then, whilst still alive, the stumps would be soaked in pitch and the torso placed in a gibbet (a steel cage) and left for the birds to find and peck to death!

During the truce which followed the siege of Tangier in 1680, Kirke made friends with Ismail, the Emperor of Morocco, who would rule his country for 55 years.    An Embassy office wrote : “He would excel all mankind in barbarity and murder, inventing every day a new pastime of cruelty”.   He would kill a slave to test the edge of a new weapon, spear a dozen negroes or strangle a woman or two from his harem as a divertissement, and even the lives of his sons were not safe from his cruelty. Despite his hatred of all foreigners, Ismail took a liking to Kirke and swore “there never would be a Bullet shot against Tangier, so long as Kirke was on it”. They exchanged gifts, the Emperor sending Kirke 12 cows and a Christian woman in return for some Irish greyhounds. Ismail confirmed his vow that if none but Kirke and his wife (Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the fourth Earl of Suffolk) should be left alone in Tangier, he would not betray Kirke.

Pepys, who disliked Kirke intensely, recorded in colourful, if exaggerated detail, all the gossip and scandal associated with him. He thought he was the most foul mouthed man he had ever met, as he and his officers publicly boasted of their amorous affairs and how they defamed every woman who yielded to their invitations:
According to Bishop Ken, the chaplain of Lord Dartmouth’s fleet, Kirke caused a scandal by seeking to obtain the post of garrison chaplain at Tangier for a Mr Roberts, the brother of his current mistress. Kirke’s morals may have been appalling, but probably no worse than those of many of his contemporaries (Pepys himself demanded sexual favours from women in return for better postings for their male relatives in the Navy!) He kept mistresses in an age when that was normal, with royal precedents and the examples of the court and his fellow officers. As a contemporary broadsheet put it:
Those foolish things called wives are grown unfashionable and the keeping of a mistress the principle character of a fashionable, well-bred gentleman.
It was probably his reputation for brutality (and that of his regiment) that helped in his selection to command the operation to round up and deal with the rebels after the Monmouth Rebellion and Battle of Sedgemoor. He continued to be a trusted commander under James II. Asked about quitting the Church of England and converting to Catholicism during James’ purge of Protestant officers, he replied that “unfortunately he was prearranged, for, when on Tangier, he had promised the Sultan that if ever he changed his religion, he would turn Mohammedan.”

The hatred that existed between Kirke and Samuel Pepys was as a writer, irresistible!  So in my novel Pepys orders that Kirke is tortured to divulge the whereabouts of James Scott - The Duke of Monmouth.  In my publication Monmouth survived the Tower and was placed in an ‘Iron Mask’ and held by King Louis XIV until Michael Fane rescues him.

The executioner was Simon Lovelock - Simon is a fictious character - but the chapter ‘In the Dovecote of Death’ Simon sets about ’skinning Kirke alive’!  I enjoyed writing it, my wife edited it!  When the book was submitted I fully expected the chapter to be ‘toned down’ - in fact the editers added more!

Simon is a ‘master swordsman’ - he was taught by O’Carroll - in the ‘Further Adventures’ due out in the summer of 2009 you will meet the very man himself.