It’s January 18th – John Moray’s birthday!

And lest you think I’m losing my mind here in my writing room, starting to believe my characters are real people, let me reassure you that John Moray, hero of my book The Winter Sea, was very much a real man, born on this day in 1672 at his family’s estate of Abercairny in Perthshire, Scotland.

If you haven’t yet met John, perhaps the best way you can meet him is the same way that the heroine first meets him in that novel:

“For Sophia, that small moment which came afterwards would evermore be burned within her memory. She never would forget.

Two men stepped through the doorway of the drawing-room, but she saw only one. The man who entered first, with hat in hand, and crossed to greet the countess, might have been a shade, for all Sophia paid him notice. She was looking at the man who’d come behind, and who now stood two paces back and waited, at a soldier’s ease.

He was a handsome man, not over tall, but with the broadened shoulders and well-muscled legs of one who did not live a soft and privileged life, but earned his pay with work. He wore a wig, as fashion did demand of any gentleman, but while the wigs of most men were yet long about the shoulders, his was short at top and sides, drawn back and tied with ribbon in a queue that neatly hung behind. He wore a leather buffcoat, with no collar and no sleeves, split at the sides for riding, with a long row of ball buttons up the front, and at the back a black cloak fastened to the coat below the shoulders, hanging full so that it covered half the sword hung from the broad belt passing over his right shoulder. His sleeves were plain, as was the neckcloth knotted at his throat, and his close-fitting breeches ended at the knees in stiff dragoon boots, not in buckled shoes and stockings.

To Sophia’s mind, he cut a proud, uncompromising figure, yet his grey eyes, in that handsome and impassive face, were not unkind. They swung to hers in silence, and she could not look away.”

John caught my own gaze for the first time in the pages of Edinburgh historian John S. Gibson’s excellent nonfiction book, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708, a book I found by chance one day that lured me down the rabbit-holes of research which, years later, led me to The Winter Sea.

John was a shadowy presence in Mr Gibson’s book. Introduced as “a naturalised Frenchman and officer in the army of France, Captain John Moray, brother of the Jacobite Laird of Abercairney in Strathearn”, he would vanish for many pages only to reappear again in a stray mention, telling me that he was guiding Gibson’s main focus character – the more swashbuckling Colonel Nathaniel Hooke – through the Highlands, or accompanying him back to Scotland from France, but with little more detail than that.

I started to wonder about this man who seemed always to be moving in the background, quietly doing important things, so I tried looking past the so-called “men of action” and instead did all I could to bring John clearly into focus.

Mr Gibson’s Notes and Sources section was a good place to start, because it pointed me to the primary sources he’d used, but even Nathaniel Hooke’s own account of his travels didn’t give me a close enough view of the man at his side (although finding a copy of that book was one of my personal triumphs, and the book itself is something I treasure).

And then one morning in the British Library, I found the letters John had written home from France, as a young man, to both his brother and his mother. And for the first time, I heard his voice.

That was when I truly met John Moray.

I’ve since met all his brothers, and his sisters, and many members of his extended family, and the more of them I meet, the more amazed I am that they’ve been curated so neatly out of history, having played so great a role in all that happened in their times.

It’s become an obsession of mine, I’ll admit, to restore them to their rightful place in that history, in whatever way I can as a novelist. I hope I live long enough to accomplish it. Good people should be remembered.

I count myself incredibly fortunate to have been befriended by John’s family’s descendants, who still live on and care for the estates of Abercairny and Inchbrakie, and who have been generous with their knowledge, time and help with all my research.

I hope you’ll join me in raising a glass (and passing it over the water, of course, like a true Jacobite!) to wish John the happiest birthday, wherever it is that such true-hearted soldiers find rest.