The first time I read The King’s General was on a melancholy autumn day, not long after I’d started at a new school, in a town where I knew no one, at the age of fourteen. Daphne du Maurier’s landscape—seventeenth-century Cornwall, last refuge of brave Cavaliers—was entirely distant to mine; hundreds of years and miles away, further by far than the home I’d left behind. But as I sought refuge in the school library, escaping the rain and all the people I didn’t know, and who didn’t want to know me, the book seemed more real to me than the unfamiliar place I had found myself; offered more solace than anything else at the time.
Returning to The King’s General, decades later, reminds me of how well it expresses the sadness of the dislocated and dispossessed. That might sound melodramatic—and the book is melodramatic, at times; just as I was as a teenager, about the dismal misery of my new life—but The King’s General, so often overlooked by literary critics, is more than a melodrama, more subtle and unsettling. Widely regarded as a straightforward historical romance—which it can be, if that’s simply what you want it to be—the novel also does something unusual, creating a story that feels timeless, for all its period detail. The description of the Cornish setting—always vivid in du Maurier’s writing; far more than a backdrop, as crucial as any of the main characters—seems as atmospheric and as true now as when The King’s General was first published in 1946. Anyone who loves Cornwall, as I do (both as a real and imaginary landscape) will be comforted by the idea that the hills and the moorland, the beaches and the cliff tops, remain, in essence, those that du Maurier’s heroine, Honor Harris, gazed upon as her story opens in 1653; and I like to think that future readers of the novel will feel the same way.
That opening is also an ending—or close to an ending, it seems; though du Maurier is unsurpassed at keeping secrets, at the same time as hinting at revelations to come. At fourteen, I found it impossible not to look at the ending, so intriguing was the first chapter: but unlike any other writer that I can think of, du Maurier still managed not to give the game away; at least not to me, the cheating reader; not then, for it is only when you read the whole book that the final page makes sense.
So it would be entirely wrong of me to break the suspense now, in this introduction; though I think it safe to say that the first few pages, with their description of a summer’s end, and the encroaching chill of autumn, are a perfect indication of what is about to unfold. “The first clouds of evening are gathering beyond the Dodman,” observes the novel’s sole narrator, Honor Harris, an ailing woman writing by candlelight. “And the surge of the sea, once far-off and faint, comes louder now, creeping towards the sands. The tide has turned. Gone are the white stones and the cowrie shells. The sands are covered. My dreams are buried. And as darkness falls the flood tide sweeps over the marshes and the land is covered.”
Faraway, across the sea, Honor imagines her former lover, Sir Richard Grenvile—the King’s General no longer—banished from the land he loved. “My heart aches for you in this last disgrace,” writes Honor. “I picture you sitting lonely and bitter at your window, gazing out across the dull flat lands of Holland…” As an opening, it is as brooding as the first pages of Rebecca; and the darkness of that more famous novel, published eight years previously, casts a shadow over The King’s General, too. There are other similarities, as well: for like the hero of Rebecca, Sir Richard Grenvile is a ruthless, powerful man; more powerful, apparently, than the woman who loves him.
Daphne du Maurier dedicated The King’s General to her husband, Sir Frederick Browning, a Grenadier Guards officer, otherwise known as Tommy: “To my husband, also a general, but, I trust, a more discreet one.” Margaret Forster’s marvelous biography of Daphne du Maurier reveals that Tommy (who had been knighted in the 1946 New Year’s Honours List) guessed that his wife’s dedication would make people assume that Richard Grenvile, “first a soldier, second a lover,” a man “violent from his youth… cruel… hard,” was based on him. Tommy (a likeable chap, by all accounts, though prone to depression) was amused; at the same time as expressing the hope, in a letter to his wife, that her latest novel might “have a nice ending for a change, because you know what I think of your sad endings.”
But there was to be no happy ending for Honor and her general; an indication, perhaps, that Daphne (who wrote the book while Tommy was still stationed abroad) was fearful of what might happen to their marriage when he finally returned to Menabilly, their house in Cornwall. And Menabilly was to play a crucial part in The King’s General: it is where much of the action takes place, and Daphne immersed herself in its history when she was researching the novel. The house had fascinated Daphne ever since she first discovered it, soon after her parents bought a holiday house in Fowey in 1927, and its original owners, the Rashleighs, were also to appear in The King’s General. She was particularly intrigued by the tale of a skeleton found in Menabilly in the nineteenth century, apparently discovered by builders, in a bricked-up room. As she explains in her postscript to the novel, the workmen “came upon a stair, leading to a small room, or cell, at the base of the buttress. Here they found the skeleton of a young man, seated on a stool, a trencher at his feet, and the skeleton was dressed in the clothes of a Cavalier, as worn during the period of the Civil War.” The rest—in Daphne’s version, anyway—is not history, but romance; though the story as she told it seemed entirely convincing to me, as a teenager (far more so than those dreary history textbooks about the struggles between Royalists and Parliament that I should have been reading instead).
Given the success of other du Maurier stories that were turned into films—Rebecca, The Birds, Don’t Look Now—I’d always half expected to see The King’s General as a swashbuckling Hollywood movie. But despite the sale of the rights for what was then the enormous sum of £65,000—part of which was spent on a new boat for Tommy after the war—the film was never made. (After years of setbacks and delays, Elizabeth Taylor was suggested to play the heroine in 1958: Daphne was horrified by the prospect; nor did she like the script.) I still think it would make a good film—it has the right blend of epic and intimate qualities—but there is pleasure, too, to be had in feeling the book to be one’s own private discovery. When I first read it I knew no one else who had, so its revelations and secrets remained mine alone. This, of course, is part of the conceit of the novel, from the beginning: Honor Harris, she tells us in the first chapter, knows “this autumn will be the last” for her, and her memoir “will go with me to the grave… rotting there with me, unread.” Honor’s purpose, in writing down her secrets, is, she says, “to rid myself of a burden”; and though Daphne du Maurier chooses not to reveal why, or how, the story escapes from the grave, the reader is left with the sense that we have been given not a burden, but a gift.
It’s a remarkable achievement—and all the more so, I realize now, as I reread The King’s General in my own middle age. As a fourteen-year-old, I adored the novel’s early chapters that describe Honor Harris as a spirited teenager, before tragedy had torn her life apart; now, while I still love that part of The King’s General, I also appreciate du Maurier’s account of growing older. Towards the end of the book, when Sir Richard Grenvile has remarked in a letter to Honor that doubtless she finds her days monotonous, alone in Cornwall, she observes:
I have seen the shadows creep, on an autumn afternoon, from the deep Pridmouth valley to the summit of the hill, and there stay a moment, waiting on the sun… Dark moods too of bleak November, when the rain sweeps in a curtain from the southwest. But, quietest of all, the evenings of late summer, when the sun has set, and the moon has not yet risen, but the dew is heavy in the long grass.
You could not ask for a better, swifter description both of the passing of the seasons, and the turning of the years. Daphne was in her late thirties when she wrote the novel—“a dull, gray-haired, nearly-forty wife,” she wrote in a letter soon after Tommy arrived home from the war—and while by no means close to death herself, it cannot be coincidence that she chose to write about Honor Harris, who died at the age of thirty-eight. (Like the other principal characters in the novel, there was a real Honor Harris, who was buried in a church near Menabilly, in the parish of Tywardreath, on 17th November 1653.) Daphne herself lived on until the age of nearly eighty-two: a long, extraordinary life, in which she became one of the most wildly popular authors of her time. Yet nowhere in her writing, it seems to me, than in The King’s General will you find better expression of that bittersweet blend of foreboding and hopefulness, of passionate love and anguished loss, that marks what it means to grow up. “Come now, take heart,” says Honor’s brother Jonathan, on the final page of the book, when we know she is nearing her end, fading into the twilight that has shaded her story from the start. “One day the King will come into his own again; one day your Richard will return.”
“One day,” replies Honor, repeating lines that have echoed throughout the novel, “when the snow melts, when the thaw breaks, when the spring comes.”
Justine Picardie
2003