The King's Chameleon
Page 33
As for Faulkner’s part in these events, I have used some freedom in my yarn. However, someone must have co-ordinated Armerer’s rendezvous with Sackler, just as someone carried the King’s letter to Albemarle, anchored in The Downs prior to the Four Day’s Battle of the first to the fourth of June 1666 – ‘the greatest naval battle in the Age of Sail,’ as Nicholas Rodger has called it. I saw no reason why it should not have been Faulkner, though the Albion is my own invention.
Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year proved useful while the Diaries of Pepys and Evelyn have naturally proved valuable sources for details. Among other snippets Pepys records the sound of Dutch gunfire off Harwich being heard in Bethnal Green, and Evelyn the defection of seamen to the Dutch, thanks to their lack of pay prior to the attack on the Medway. Evelyn also lays charges of incompetence and lack of money causing the catastrophic failure to commission the fleet in the spring of 1667, while Albemarle’s biographers, Thomas Gumble and Sir Julian Corbett, state he was sent to Chatham by the King during the Dutch raid. Details of the Dutch attack are confusing and, at times, conflicting, particularly in terms of culpability, but the consequences are not. One third of the naval fleet in the Medway was destroyed or taken by the Dutch.
What is of passing interest is that so much that went on in these years mirrors our own time: corruption in high places, natural and unnatural disaster, economic meltdown, a run on the banks and the consequential panicky movement of people. Besides such examples, one finds in these years other parallels: religious intolerance and fundamentalism, neglect of the navy and a failure to invest in essential infrastructure, to say nothing of unlawful rendition and draconian punishment.
In an uncertain world it is some comfort to realize that a past period of similar mighty upheaval was eventually stabilized and ordered – at least to some degree.
Finally, to avoid complication and for purposes of chronology with reference to the years in which the story takes place, I have used the modern Julian calendar.