The hero of the Edward Ware Thrillers at War Series, Colonel Sir Edward Ware of Ware Hall just outside Salisbury in the South of England, has an ancestry that stretches all the way back through British history to the time of the Romans. The founder of his family, Lucius Antonius, served under Julius Caesar in the Alexandrian Campaign and then fled to Britain. Caesar, of course, was the first Roman general to venture that far doing experiments on latitude and longitude. While there he heard tales from Viking seamen of lands to the West, which of course turned out centuries later to be America.
Edward’s Family Tree includes Lucius Antonius’s grandson who served in the ill-fated expedition to Germany in 9AD where two of Augustus’s legions were lost to the barbaric German tribes. He escaped to return to Britain with his family not far from where the later Ware Hall was to be located many centuries later. Caelius Antonius’s grandson, Caius, also served under Pliny the Elder, the wisest of the Roman writers, naturalists, and philosophers, in Germany. The German tribes at that time were attempting to get revenge for Germanicus’s expedition in 14 AD to get back the standards stolen in 9AD. At the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD they once again found refuge in the British Isles.
Only one century before Edward enlisted in the army with Lawrence of Arabia in the Great War, Edward’s Family Tree indicates that his great-grandfather served under the Duke of Wellington fighting Napoleon at Waterloo. So his dynasty is well-established at the estate just south of London where Wares have lived for centuries at least up until it was destroyed by German bombers during the Battle of Britain in 1940 —- those same Germans his ancestors were fighting —- only to have it restored again after the war for his son to inherit to continue the Ware tradition.
