Paycocke’s House is now 500 years old. Do you feel this new work is a fitting historical testament to its antiquity?
Orlando Wysocki: Yes, Paycocke’s has its 500th anniversary this year, having been constructed in the spring and summer of 1509 by the clothier Thomas Paycocke. It hadn’t been my intention to match the book’s release with the quincentennial, but publishing delays conspired to bring the two dates together.

The architectura importance of Paycocke’s has been well documented, and it is a rare textbook that does not feature the house - indeed, Pevsner, the architectural bible, calls it the finest example of domestic perpendicular in the country. This is where we get to the crux of matter, domestic: Paycocke’s House is a simple, if wildly elaborate, home. Let’s make it clear, Thomas Paycocke was no noble, no wealthy cleric or royal sycophant; he was an ordinary man from a self-made family, middle-class at best. The Paycockes were originally Suffolk butchers in the 15th century, spotted which way the wind was blowing vis-ŕ-vis the wool trade and hopped on the bandwagon. It was a short step from processing a sheep’s meat to its wool and the family became hugely prosperous as a result, moving to Coggeshall in Essex, equidistant from London and the major East Anglian ports, so ideally placed for trade.

Thomas Paycocke celebrated his good fortune by ploughing his wealth into his new home, the design of which would have been quite outlandish for a merchant, resplendent carved oak both inside and out, cutting edge oriel windows, elegant linenfold panelling in the parlour and his own Paycocke ‘merchant’s mark’ carved in profusion. Paycocke had it and flaunted it.

The Cleaving of Paycocke’s taps into the spirit of Thomas, not a man to stand on ceremony. It is an elaborate journey through the history of Paycocke’s, a page-turner of a mystery, introducing characters and their secrets from three different periods in the lifetime of the house, and drawing them together in one story. It is no formal assessment of Tudor architecture, but a living, breathing story, with Paycocke’s House as a major protagonist.

I like to think The Cleaving of Paycocke’s would have been Thomas’s kind of book.

How revealing (and how relevant) did the eminent historian GM Trevelyan’s work prove during the research for this book?
Orlando Wysocki: Trevelyan was one of the great historians of the mid-20th century, but more relevant for me was that he was perhaps the greatest social historian. English Social History, his epic trawl through six centuries of English grit, was not just about the movers and shakers of our society, the great monarchs and politicians, but more roundly focused on humbler levels of society, the sort to which Paycocke and his peers belonged. When you follow Trevelyan’s progress through the ages, you not only see how a family such as the Paycockes lived, but you get a real sense of their place in history and how they evolved.

Now, researching the movements of Henry VII is easy, finding out the sorts of bread each class ate, which colours they wore, how they decorated their houses, which herbs and plants they used, these questions require a little more detective work. Not that Trevelyan himself had all the answers laid out pat, but he enabled me to rephrase my questions and sent me down paths I might otherwise have missed. As with any historical novel, what you see in the final version is the iceberg tip of what has been learned. The story is king, however, and the research serves not to give a history lesson, but as set dressing. A throwaway line such as the scent of a character’s breath or the cut of his shoes may have a week’s research behind it, but that week should never be seen.

Did you give much consideration to the old historical maxim of ‘what might have been’ when we learn of King Henry VIII’s dark secret being concealed at the hands of original owner, John Paycocke?
Orlando Wysocki: It was Henry VII rather than Henry VIII who I imagined approached John Paycocke as the sentinel for his secret. Henry VIII would have known nothing of it (as his father intended). This element of my tale is complete fabrication - I created this terrible conflict for Henry VII and presented him with an ally, John Paycocke, as a way out of his dilemma, in turn putting the monkey on Paycocke’s back.

We do know that Henry VII travelled extensively in East Anglia, but there is no record as to whether he ever set foot in Coggeshall (then Coxhall). Under normal circumstances, the king would have had little to do with a man of Paycocke’s class directly, but then, this was no normal secret he harboured. As we see in the prologue, John is torn apart by the burden placed upon him by the king, but at the same time he has been granted royal favour and his fortunes have improved immeasurably, enabling him to secure his sons’ (of whom Thomas will unwittingly inherit guardianship of the royal secret) futures.

What else could John do? Without giving too much away, had he opposed Henry, history would have taken a completely different path. Paycocke might have been executed or banished; had he revealed Henry’s secret, it might have threatened the entire monarchy. At the beginning of the novel, Henry VII has begun to bring stability to England after decades of war and uncertainty, and England is set for a period of peace and prosperity outside the memory of any man alive. Getting inside John’s head, it is a straightforward choice to make, although it torments him for the rest of his days. As with any choice we make, the effects can ripple out way beyond our intentions.

Do the Tudor and Edwardian eras of British history hold a particular significance for you? If so, how do you feel this emerged in the development of your latest work?
Orlando Wysocki: I am a child of immigrant parents, with no British axes to grind or skeletons to bury, so I suppose this allows me a certain objectivity on British history, a carte blanche to pick and mix the eras I favour, and it is true that the Tudor period enthrals me. In summer, you are likely to see me at festivals here and there with a group of mummers, performing traditional Tudor plays. I have also taken part for a number of years at the annual Tudor re-enactments, living the part of a Tudor for several weeks, eating, sleeping, talking and dressing in the manner of the era, and there is no doubt that I have used my experiences to furnish my book. The greatest compliment I have been paid about The Cleaving is when a reader told me, "It felt like I was there."

When I started to do my research for the book, the character of Imogen drew me in, rather than the Edwardian period in which she lived, and she quickly became for me a talisman of the change overwhelming Britain in those post-World War I years. Change, of course, is not something to which Paycocke’s House is immune. It has altered over the centuries according to the needs of the families who have lived there, extensions added, removed, doors inserted and taken away, a myriad of DIY projects characterising the evolution of the house. And that is how it should be, for we none of us remain the same: our pasts define us (whatever secrets accompany us), but we are affected by events and by people. We all change.

Would Winston Churchill’s famous statement concerning a riddle wrapped inside an enigma be a good analogy for unearthing the long-held secret buried within Paycocke’s House?
Orlando Wysocki: Like a matryoshka doll, Churchill’s "...riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma..." refers to layers of deceit, lies, and veneer to be stripped away before the truth can be revealed, and we do see this very clearly in The Cleaving. Talking about Russia in 1939, Churchill might easily have been speaking about himself. It is an apt comment from a man around in The Cleaving’s Edwardian strand, the 1923 of the recently created Soviet Union, although at that time Churchill’s reputation was much tainted by his First World War plan to create a new front, which led to horrific Allied losses at Gallipoli. Despite this, he was able to shed his skin and reinvent himself as father of the soundbite and much vaunted political leader.

In my novel the original 15th century secret of Paycocke’s House is layered both by rumour and myth, and further by the discoveries made by inhabitants of the house over the following centuries, who add their own contribution to the puzzle, muddying the waters of the original conundrum. Gossip, lies, secrets, deceit, these are things which emphasise our frailty. Most people have episodes in their past which they would prefer to remain buried. The longer a secret remains hidden, the harder it is to tease it from its shell, and that is how it proved to be for the characters in The Cleaving. Yet one question remains for us: once the secret is known, it cannot be unknown, and what do we do then? Does it become our liberator or our Pandora’s box?

Do you feel a special affinity for the House and the strange incidents and fascinating characters which have populated its past? Can you share with us some interesting examples which do not figure in your book?
Orlando Wysocki: The house feels special and unique to me. It is true that when you walk in through the imposing front door, the air is chillier than outside, but the feeling you have within is benign, almost a welcome from all the people who have lived there. It has always been a family home and still is today, the sort of house to which any of us, given a bit of luck in trading, might have aspired 500 years ago. Although I endow the house with a creepy disposition at times in the book, this is far from the reality (or the reality to me, at least). I have always felt that it pulsates with all the people who have lived there: the Paycockes; their descendants the Buxtons; Gustav Holst and his family; Lord Noel Buxton (who dedicated the restoration of the house to his father Thomas Fowell Buxton, prominent in the abolition of slavery movement) and his wife Lucy, one of the first female members of Parliament; Conrad Noel the socialist vicar, known for flying the Red Flag and that of Sinn Fein at his church; the Cambridge historian Eileen Power, who lived there towards the end of the second world war, writing an academic text about Paycocke’s; and countless ordinary families.

Interestingly, the house is traditionally thought to have been a wedding present from John Paycocke to his son Thomas and his wife Margaret Horrold, and this was presented as fact in the Eileen Power book The Paycockes of Coggeshall, but we now know this to be untrue as dendrochronology tells us that the house was not built until four years after John’s death. Again, this is an example of how stories can escalate and be twisted over time through rumour and speculation.

It is said that a child was once hanged in the attic at Paycocke’s House. There is no evidence or true substance to this tale and no real clue as to when it began. Myth, legend, speculation, perhaps a dash of truth even, merge to become fireside tales.

On World Cup final day in 1966, a lady in Edwardian dress was seen in the garden by a local woman. An auspicious day to choose, perhaps, or maybe it was safe to come out while the majority of the population was clustered around its radio and television sets.

In the 1970s, the then gardener of the house claims to have met and chatted to a man in Tudor apparel at the bottom of the garden towards the river Blackwater, which we know Paycocke would have used for both for transport and also for the processes of cloth-making. The man was sitting on a garden bench and disappeared when the gardener turned his back.

Attention-seeking tales? Who knows?

What are your own views on the subject of spiritual presences within historic, haunted homes? Have you ever experienced any ghostly apparitions?
Orlando Wysocki: I keep an open mind. There are too many incidents and sightings documented for a wholesale blithe dismissal of the supernatural. However, rumours and gossip can snowball over centuries and there is no way of telling where fact ends and fiction begins. Paycocke’s is also said to be haunted by a Grey Lady, who has been seen in the main bedroom. Although I myself never saw anything, I did have visitors claiming, without any prompting, to sense a female presence there. No other room was ever mentioned. I do think that a certain sector of the population is more sensitive to the vibes of a place, and picks up on things which might pass the rest of us by.

As I say, I have never actually seen anything, but one evening after dark, my teenage daughter and I were followed through the house by heavy rasping breathing. No matter where we went, it maintained the same distance from us, as though it were at our shoulders. I never felt threatened or uneasy, but just had the feeling that someone wanted to communicate with us, that there was something that needed to be said. At many points during the writing of The Cleaving things seemed to fall eerily into place, and at times I wondered whether my novel was partly helped by the house, influenced by the people who had lived there, but I suppose I shall never know...