The Marsh King’s Daughter

Synopsis

King John has set his seal to the Magna Carta and made promises to mend his ways, but there is still great dissatisfaction with his rule.

Among the rebellious nobles is young Nicholas de Caen who has been taken prisoner because he knows a terrible secret about the king. While crossing the treacherous tidal estuary of The Wash with the royal baggage train, the tide comes in, and during the ensuing panic, Nicholas escapes along with a very valuable portion of King John’s treasure. Half-drowned and injured, Nicholas is discovered and nursed back to health at a convent by a young novice nun, Miriel of Wisbech. Miriel herself has been forced into the nunnery and is seeking freedom from that life. When Nicholas makes this possible, she takes advantage of the opportunity, especially with an eye to the treasure Nicholas has taken, but for both of them, there is a heavy price to pay.

Author’s note:

Readers often ask me about the title of “The Marsh King’s Daughter”. They want to know how it came about and how it relates to the novel.

The answer is that it’s a distillation of a couple of ideas and themes. I wanted to write about the loss of King John’s treasure whilst crossing the Wash estuary. We don’t know how much of the treasure was lost in the disaster as the tide came in suddenly, and how much conveniently disappeared around the time of his death at Newark Castle. We do know that one of the items of treasure that disappeared was the great German crown of his grandmother, the Empress Matilda who had brought the crown back to England from Germany in 1125. Henry II had worn it on occasion and it appears among the lists of King John’s treasures. But not after 1216. My writer’s mind began wondering what would have happened if someone had rescued some of those items of treasure at the time of the estuary disaster. What would they have done with the treasure? You can’t just go and sell a crown down at the local market, and even melting it down would be problematical. That led to the germ of my story and Nicholas and Miriel arrived to flesh it out, both of them fleeing imperfect and dangerous lives.

I was also remembering from childhood the Hans Andersen story about the Marsh King’s Daughter, which involves at one stage, a reluctant woman being pinned down in a bog. I saw Miriel as kin to that woman, pinned down in a life not of her choosing. I also saw the crown of the empress as a ‘daughter’ of the marshy land of the fens, destined to lie buried until touched by fate.