When we approached the wonderful James Callis about reprising the character of Bonnaire for us in Series III of The Musketeers, this was one of the first questions he asked.
After much discussion in the Writers' Room, our ever-amazing Executive Producer Jess Pope came up with an answer. Clearly James liked it enough to come back and hopefully you can sense a lot of this rich, wonderful history in the finished episode!
(NOTE: won't be able to blog for the next few weeks but look out for some BIG POSTS about the last EVER episode around July 30 !)
(NOTE: won't be able to blog for the next few weeks but look out for some BIG POSTS about the last EVER episode around July 30 !)
Bonnaire Back Story - Episode Four
Six years after the Musketeers put him on a boat to Cadiz Emile Bonnaire is back in France but he hasn't, as we might have thought, returned from Spain; he never, in fact arrived there. Barely out of Le Havre he threw himself overboard in the middle of the night and swam back to the port where he instead took another packet to England. And he has been there ever since.
Arriving with nothing other than his wits and the clothes he stood up in he made his way to Oxford and found employment in the University of Oxford's Botanic Garden (Estab 1621) as a plantsman/apothecary where his knowledge and experience of the then rare and unknown equatorial flora and fauna made him something of a marvel and a local sensation.
As a natural-born French gentleman his name eventually came to the attention of the French Queen, Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles I who never really mastered English as a language. And thus Emile settled into a relatively humble but comfortable life on the fringes of the Royal Household. He met and married a young woman, Caroline, a minor servant in the Queen's household, not high born but bright and a favourite of the Queen's.
Emile bewitched her with his tales of white sand beaches and an island paradise 'out there' beyond the English rain and it became their private impossible dream - that if they ever had the chance to make it a reality they would grab the opportunity with both hands and run off to a new adventure together on the other side of the world.
When Henrietta decided to sell her jewels in Paris and asked Caroline to accompany her in utmost secrecy, it was that chance. And Emile, after five years as an 'honest' man and with Caroline's blessing and collusion, broke bad again.....
