The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  ‘Well spoken, My Lord,’ said Arlington sarcastically, evidently revelling in his rival’s discomfort. ‘And of course, the wise minister takes precautions. Namely, you, Matthew Quinton, our precaution-in-chief.’

  ‘My Lord?’

  ‘Your loyalty is beyond reproach. That business in Scotland in the year sixty-two, for instance… There are few captains of the navy to whom the Lord Chancellor and I would dare to speak thus frankly, Quinton.’

  I looked from one man to the other, and felt a sudden shiver of apprehension.

  Arlington moved towards me, his eyes narrowing as he approached. ‘It seems to us that this great conspiracy, if it truly exists, must have a leader. There must be a new Cromwell lurking in the shade, seeking his moment. If twenty captains are to defect, we believe they must do so at a given moment, upon a signal from that leader – the hoist of a flag, or whatever it is you mariners do to attract attention.’ The Secretary looked me square in the eyes. ‘You know Sir John Lawson, I take it?’

  ‘Lawson?’ I gasped. ‘But My Lords, it cannot be imagined that Lawson would turn traitor –’

  ‘He turned traitor before,’ said Arlington relentlessly, ‘traitor to the Commonwealth that he had served so notably, and I have often observed that treason can be addictive. He was also a good friend to some of the fanatic captains who have been left on shore.’

  ‘But he could have died in the London, if he had gone aboard when he was meant to! I was there, my lords! I saw the consequences, as did he! To blow up his own ship, and many of his own kin –’

  ‘An effective way of diverting suspicion from oneself, perhaps. Or else, of course, the destruction of the London might have been but a convenient accident which achieved just that end.’ The Secretary smiled wearily. ‘You see the dangers of my occupation, Captain? Trust no one, suspect everyone – the sad fate of the intelligencer.’

  ‘Sir John is appointed Vice-Admiral of the Red,’ said Clarendon, who had averted his eyes during Arlington’s peroration but evidently could not bring himself to dismiss it entirely. ‘Thus he holds the second command in His Royal Highness’s own squadron. A position of considerable trust, Quinton. Imagine the consequences if Sir John went over to the Dutch during the battle, and turned his own ship and others against His Royal Highness himself.’

  And there was the other reason why Clarendon was reluctantly going along with Arlington’s belief in the plot. For in the Chancellor’s scheme of things a threat to the Duke of York was more, much more, than a mere threat to the heir to the throne; it was the potential overthrow of all his dynastic ambition.

  The secretary nodded. ‘That would be danger indeed – especially if Lawson was seconded in any defection by the Rear-Admiral of that same squadron.’

  ‘Berkeley? Will Berkeley? But he’s one of my oldest and dearest friends! He’s as true a cavalier as any of us, as are all his family! His brother is the king’s favourite! This is madness, My Lords –’

  My stomach had tightened and my heart was racing. Was it possible for the plague to be brought on by shock?

  I saw at once from the expressions of both Clarendon and Arlington that I had struck entirely the wrong note. Yes, my good friend Rear-Admiral Sir Will Berkeley was the brother of the king’s favourite, the good-humoured but utterly worthless Earl of Falmouth; and throughout history, there has been a marked tendency for king’s ministers to be ousted from power at the whim of king’s favourites. Consequently, the former have ever been inclined to seek ways of preemptively bringing down the latter. Here, then, was something else that temporarily united the Chancellor and the Secretary: an aversion to the House of Berkeley and all its works.

  ‘I have been as good a friend to the Berkeleys as any man,’ said Arlington, dissembling brazenly. ‘But war has a habit of breaking friendships and testing men’s allegiances, as My Lord Chancellor and I found through bitter experience.’ Clarendon glowered; he had been a noted man on the Parliament’s side before returning to the cause of the first King Charles, a fact that staunch cavaliers like Arlington – and, come to that, the Quinton family – had never forgotten. ‘But you would know this better than either of us, Quinton. Did not your friend Berkeley spend several years at sea under Lawson? Does not the Vice-Admiral have great influence over him? Is he not courting Lawson’s daughter?’

  ‘T – true, My Lords,’ I said but those are hardly the ingredients of treason –’

  ‘Probably not,’ Arlington said, essaying a benign smile that actually made his wholly malign face seem even more ghastly. ‘But as My Lord Chancellor has said, it is the responsibility of ministers of state to prepare for all eventualities – to suspect all. Some, for example, might consider such an eventuality to be the loyalty of a man with a Dutch wife.’ He stood unsettlingly close to me and stared into my eyes. My loyalty questioned because of Cornelia? But I could look only at the hideous plaster, and the way it dipped into the deep scar beneath. I shuddered, and prayed that he had not noticed. Then, unexpectedly, Arlington smiled. ‘But I would be the last man to do so, Quinton, for I, too, expect to wed a countrywoman of your good lady in the near future.’ So he did, and to a woman with a rather better pedigree than Cornelia’s: a bastard granddaughter of a Prince of Orange, no less. Arlington stepped away a little and returned to our matter in hand. ‘No doubt you will be proved correct, and Admirals Lawson and Berkeley will play full parts in the great victory to come, earning the applause of their sovereign and nation, garnering honour to their names for all posterity, etcetera.’ His face hardened. ‘But in case it proves otherwise, Captain Matthew Quinton and the great ship Merhonour will be on hand. We have prevailed upon His Royal Highness to place you directly behind Lawson’s new flagship, as his second. If –’

  ‘If Lawson, Berkeley and others defect during the battle,’ Clarendon interrupted, his tone clipped and harsh, ‘you will be in position to fight them. If you have to, Quinton, you must sink them. Destroy the traitors. At all costs, preserve the life of His Royal Highness, my son-in-law.’

  * * *

  I rode toward Hardiman’s Yard in a dark, vicious mood, a condition not improved by the travails of my journey. The Charing-Cross was clogged with people, the Strand beyond it little better, and when I finally reached the Lud Gate, a heaving and immobile crowd was jostling to find a way past a great cart that had lost a wheel in the very gateway itself. Tempers were rising, and as they did so, the veneer of a land at peace with itself swiftly evaporated.

  ‘Charles Stuart is nought but a papist and a whoremaster!’ cried one voice.

  ‘Rebel scum! Vive le roi! Vive le roi!’ came an answering shout, which was joined in short order by many others.

  ‘Christ will reign upon earth, for the old cause rises again! The comet foretells the death of kings!’

  ‘For the King and the Church!’ At that, part of the crowd surged. I saw a flurry of fists, and heard the first clash of steel upon steel. The first scream of pain followed hard on its heels.

  Once, I would have launched myself into the fray on the side of the stout cavalier lads, but though little older, I was distinctly wiser. With difficulty, I manoeuvred my horse out of the crowd and made my way up to Holborn Bar, thence into High Holborn itself, steering my horse through the foul hordes of lawyers and their clerks. As I did so, I fell to contemplation of my condition.

  My pride in the command of the Merhonour had largely evaporated, for I could see only the vision of her standing broadside-to-broadside with Will Berkeley’s Swiftsure, Englishman against Englishman, friend against friend. Did Clarendon and Arlington really reflect the will of the king in this business, I wondered? Somehow I had been sucked into the blackest place of all, that foul, vicious world which men call ‘politics’, and I hated it. Clarendon and Arlington had sworn me to silence, so honour dictated that I could not approach my brother, one of only two men who could have steered me safely out of this seething pit; and even if I was prepared to lay my honour to one side, the gulf between Charles a
nd me upon the matter of his dubious countess was surely too wide to be bridged. For the same reason, I could not go directly to the only other man on earth who could have attested to the truth of the great ministers’ assertions and set my conscience at ease. King Charles was still unlikely to look favourably upon an approach from the man who had accused him of being gulled into the bed of a murderess in the pay of France.

  And yet … and yet. Someone had recommended me for the command of the Merhonour; it could not have been Clarendon, who was ignorant of naval affairs and thus eschewed naval patronage, and it would hardly have been Arlington, who was no friend to the Quinton family. I considered the great men of the navy, and discounted most of them at once. The Duke of Albemarle I barely knew, and he was known not to favour young gentlemen captains. Pepys’s patron, Lord Sandwich, was almost equally unknown to me. Then there was Sir William Penn, whom I had met at the Navy Board: but he, too, was a favourer of bluff old tarpaulin captains, and was the man most responsible for the recall of all the Commonwealth veterans.

  Finally there was Prince Rupert, cousin to the king and duke, but he was anathema to we Quintons, for we blamed him for the death of my father, Earl James, at the Battle of Naseby. On that desperate June day in 1645, Rupert’s cavalry swept the enemy before them but then galloped off the battlefield in hot pursuit rather than turning in against the Roundhead infantry. Only one of Rupert’s officers had halted his troop’s charge in order to fall upon the footsoldiers of the New Model Army; but without support, the ninth Earl of Ravensden and his men were swallowed up and hacked to pieces. Thus the devil was a more likely friend for Matthew Quinton than the Prince Palatine of the Rhine.

  Which left one, and only one: the Earl of Clarendon’s son-in-law.

  At the time of his brother’s restoration, James, Duke of York, who would one day reign briefly and ingloriously over his Britannic realms as King James the Second and Seventh, was the heir to three kingdoms and thus one of the most eligible bachelors in Europe. But he had thrown away the valuable diplomatic card of his marriage by secretly wedding one of his sister’s maids-of-honour, a plain, witty girl who was eight months pregnant by him when they belatedly reached the altar. How history is dictated by the unanticipated rise of a male member at the sight of an inappropriate woman’s shapely leg or bosom! For fate dictated that the royal bedfellow was the daughter of Edward Hyde, the man whom the duke’s elder brother had just made his chief minister and Earl of Clarendon. To those who favour conspiracy over coincidence, this was damning: surely the evil minister had used his daughter’s charms to ensnare the heir to the throne, thus furthering the nefarious purposes of the said evil minister? Hindsight poured yet more oil onto the flames; yea, an entire ocean of oil. The king’s marriage to the Portuguese princess Catherine proved childless, and it did not require too fertile an imagination to conjure up a dark tale of Clarendon arranging a match to a barren queen in order to ensure that his own grandchildren would one day ascend the thrones of Britain. (This they duly did, in the stolid shapes of Queens Mary and Anne; but their accessions required a series of alterations in the state that would have boggled the mind of any man alive in that year of sixty-five, myself and their grandfather included.)

  Thus as I rode into Hardiman’s Yard and endeavoured to assume an air of levity – of celebration, even – with which to break the news of my command to Cornelia, I conceived a list in my head.

  Item – the said Matthew Quinton commissioned through the patronage of the Duke of York, who in our eight years of acquaintance has barely noticed the existence of said Matthew. To what end, pray?

  Item – the said Matthew Quinton to do the bidding of My Lords of Clarendon and Arlington, respectively the most hated man in England and the most sinister. Two men known for their utter detestation of each other, yet who seem to have found common ground solely in concurring that…

  Item – the said Matthew Quinton to be the principal means of preventing the overthrow of the crown in a great naval rebellion.

  Item – the said Matthew Quinton to achieve such ends in a ship so ancient that it was built before its erstwhile commander, the said Matthew’s own grandfather, was born…

  The ship.

  A memory came to me, as clear as if I had been transported back in time to be once again an eleven-year-old boy in the library of Ravensden. A memory of my uncle Tristram, describing to me my grandfather’s own illustrated list of the ships that he had commanded during his long and controversial career as one of the great Elizabeth’s sea-dogs.

  ‘There, the Constant Esperance, in which he fought the Armada … the Gloriana, in which he sailed against Lisbon in ’89, and of course his own ship, the Ark Ravensden … ah, and the Merhonour, in which he sailed against Cadiz. Always an unlucky ship, the Merhonour, your grandfather said. Not merely unlucky. Cursed.’

  Dutchmen beware, we have a fleet

  Will make you tremble when you see’t,

  Mann’d with brave Englishmen of high renown,

  Who can and will your peacock plumes pull down…

  ~ Anon., England’s Valour, and Holland’s Terrour (1665)

  A row-boat upon the Medway, Upnor Castle to larboard, a chill north-easterly whipping up the muddy water of the river. Most of the moorings were empty, the great ships that secured to them long departed to sea. But one of the greatest of all remained, and lay dead ahead in mid-stream: the Merhonour. The splendid stern bore witness to her antiquity. Although a royal arms and cipher had been set up, the new wood and bright paint contrasted with the rest of the decoration, which belonged to Cromwell’s time or even earlier. There were not a few coats-of-arms of the Commonwealth set among the elaborate panoply of laurel wreaths and lions that scrolled around the windows of my great cabin, and as we drew nearer I even spotted an ‘ER’, the old queen’s cipher, upon the gunport-lids on either side of the rudder. Broad in the beam compared to some of the newer ships, the ports along her starboard side were in irregular lines, a tell-tale sign that extra guns had been crammed into her over the years, new ports being cut in the hull to accommodate them. A three-decker, albeit a small one, her great hull towered above us. Some of the older timbers still bore the scars of war: dents from cannonballs or the tell-tale pepper-pot marks of grape and musket fire, most of it probably dating from the last war against the Dutch but some of it, perhaps, going back to my grandfather’s day. She was ancient and she was allegedly cursed, but great God, she was mine. I had seen elephants the year before, during my voyage upon the River of Gambia, and my ship reminded me of nothing more than a great old bull-elephant, torn and bruised after too many fights: almost ready for that last journey to the graveyard, but still with one final fight left in it against the impudent young incomers from a rival herd.

  Upon a conceit, and despite the fact that I had been aboard her several times already, I ordered my crew to row me all around my command. We passed beneath the stern and the old-fashioned Jacobean windows of my cabin, then down the starboard side. The guns were in, and the ship looked suitably warlike; the masts and yards were up, and although we had but half a crew, men were about in the rigging, making clewlines and halyards shipshape. As I looked up at the wooden wall which towered over me, I felt once again the strange conflict of emotions that had assailed me more than once on the road from London to Chatham. Pride, yes, that this great ship was mine; but with it came doubts that did not merely nag; they gnawed at the very essence of my soul. She was so much larger than anything I had commanded before, and in my blacker moments I wondered whether I might have been promoted far beyond my experience and competence. In ordinary circumstances my responsibilities in commanding her would have been weighty enough, for the great ships were meant to bear the brunt of battle and thus carried most of our king’s and our people’s hopes of victory upon their broad gundecks. But my secret orders doubled those responsibilities, and doubled them again. For the Merhonour and her captain were to be the first and strongest defence against a possible rebellion in
the fleet. Upon this ancient ship and her very young captain might depend the fate of the heir to England and ultimately that of his brother, the king. And all of that was before one considered the small matter of the alleged curse.

  I looked up and saw a familiar face upon the quarterdeck: Giffard, the lieutenant, raised his hat in salute. He had been stiffly formal at my first coming aboard, and I had not yet managed to take his measure. He was a sour-faced old Jerseyman with skin like leather, one of Carteret’s cronies who had led the Parliament’s navy a merry dance in the civil war. He seemed a competent seaman, albeit too set in his ways for my liking. His main concern, and indeed mine, was the fact that we were being set out so late, long after the main body of the fleet had been manned with the best drafts of men from the Thames and the east coast. This meant that we would be left with the dregs from the outlying parts of the kingdom: God alone knew when they would arrive and what they would be like. We could not sail until we were approximately manned, and I prayed that the war was not already over by the time we were.

  Around, under the bow where the golden lion figurehead roared defiance against the Dutch hogen-mogen butterboxes, our implacable foes. Above, the union flag fluttered from the staff upon the bowsprit. And so down the larboard side, with Giffard moving across the quarterdeck to continue to watch his captain’s progress. Strictly speaking, he was now the first lieutenant, it being a new innovation by His Royal Highness that two lieutenants should be allowed to the greater ships of the fleet; nominally to improve the captain’s control of his ship, although we all knew that it was but a ploy to satisfy the insatiable demand for commissions in the navy. How the old seamen of the time roared and ranted against this monstrous innovation, declaring it to be beyond wonder and against all the customs of the service! Aye, and how they would spin in their graves if they could see a modern First Rate and its legion of six lieutenants, tripping over themselves as they scurry to impress their superiors. But then, in the year sixty-five, I had made a recommendation for the vacant post of second lieutenant with little hope of seeing it implemented; there were so many disappointed candidates for office (as I had been until so recently) that I was certain His Royal Highness would soon appoint a brash young courtier or the scion of some great noble house.