by Davies, J. D
And with that, my lifelong fear – the dread of inheriting the earldom – fell away like a redundant husk. For I had inherited it, twenty years before; and now I had made my one and, I prayed, only decision as the rightful Earl of Ravensden.
Charles Stuart scrutinised me closely, as though searching for any signs of doubt or falsehood in my statement. Then he drew himself up and grinned. ‘Truly noble! Aye, truly noble indeed! A credit to the House of Quinton, which has always been one of the staunchest bulwarks of my ancestral throne. So, Charlie – Earl of Ravensden you remain.’
My brother came to me and embraced me warmly. ‘I am forever in your debt, Matt.’
Making that statement was evidently a deep embarrassment to this most guarded of men. Fortunately, King Charles began circling us, talking almost to himself.
‘But we have to consider the other case,’ said the king, ‘which is the possibility that a very great wrong has been done to you all these years, Matt Quinton. Now, one of the more pleasurable aspects of kingship is that God has bestowed upon us a certain ability to right wrongs.’ Thus Charles Stuart resumed the royal ‘we’, transforming himself by that simple grammatical act from a devious rutting mortal into a kind of demigod. ‘In this case, it is easier to justify because of the manifest merit that you have displayed in our cause, most recently by your bravery and good conduct during the late battle of Lowestoft, and the most earnest solicitations on your behalf by our cousin, Prince Rupert, and our son James of Monmouth.’ He stopped before me and smiled broadly. ‘Your sword, Matt.’
Scarcely believing what was happening, I drew the blade that had belonged to my grandfather.
‘Well, bow, man!’ laughed Charles Stuart, taking the sword in his hand. ‘We’re the same height, after all, so if you don’t lower yourself, I’ll probably decapitate you!’
I bowed deeply before the king, felt the blade touch my shoulders, and heard the four words that I had dreamed of all my life.
‘Arise, Sir Matthew Quinton!’
HISTORICAL NOTE
Much of the action of The Blast That Tears the Skies is based on the actual historical events before, during and after the Battle of Lowestoft (3 June 1665). Like so many battles of the age of sail, this was a confusing encounter, and several of the contemporary accounts contradict each other; this is only to be expected, as there were over two hundred ships fighting simultaneously in a sea area up to ten miles long and several miles wide, with thick clouds of gunsmoke and the profusion of sails and hulls often restricting vision to the immediate area around each ship. However, some modern accounts of the battle overstate the confusion and present a distorted impression of the action. Although there remains some doubt about the preliminary manoeuvres, several of the key elements are beyond dispute: notably the British fleet’s two tacks from the rear (a feat never again accomplished in the entire era of sailing navies); the fumbled hoisting of the signal flag aboard the flagship, the duel of Royal Charles and Eendracht leading to the destruction of the latter, the heroics of the Oranje; the confusion over the command and provincial jealousies within the Dutch fleet; and the pursuit of the Dutch. The Battle of Lowestoft was arguably the worst naval disaster ever suffered by the Dutch navy, certainly the worst of its magnificent ‘golden age’ that stretched for roughly a century from 1572 to 1688, and it has been reconstructed accurately and in some detail in both Frank Fox’s superb study of the second Anglo-Dutch war, The Four Days Battle, and in my Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649–89.
The rumour that twenty former Commonwealth captains intended to defect to the Dutch during the first battle of the war was reported confidently at the time, notably in the despatches of the Venetian ambassador. The Duke of York’s narrow escape when the three courtiers nearest to him were killed, and the presence of his dog aboard the flagship, are well documented, as is the mysterious shortening of sail after the battle. There was a strong contemporary rumour alleging that Henry Brouncker had been carrying out the Duchess of York’s instructions to preserve her husband’s safety at all costs; this formed the basis of Andrew Marvell’s vitriolic attack in the Second Advice to a Painter and underpinned the parliamentary enquiry into these events in 1668. Brouncker’s own account, previously unknown but which I discovered in the British Library a few years ago (Additional Manuscript 75,413), suggests that the disastrous decision was probably based on an unfortunate series of misunderstandings. There was no ship called Merhonour in 1665, although a man-of-war of that name had served with distinction between 1590 and 1650. I have drawn aspects of the fictional story of Matthew Quinton’s Merhonour from the histories of several real ships of the period. Similarly, the loss of the House of Nassau during the battle is based upon the almost identical fate of Captain Robert Wilkinson’s Charity.
In order to accommodate the timescale of the plot, I have modified some of the chronology of 1665 to a certain extent. The London blew up on 7 March, rather than somewhat later as implied here; the Duchess of York’s visit to the fleet at Harwich took place rather earlier than I have set it. The most significant change has been to bring forward the worst effects of the plague by a couple of months. The court did not leave London until the beginning of July and went initially to Hampton Court, then to Salisbury and eventually to Oxford. The comet at the beginning of 1665 (there were actually two) and the dire predictions that followed in its wake are recorded in Pepys and many other contemporary sources. Pepys also chronicled the unfounded rumour that De Ruyter had instigated a massacre at Guinea, the catalyst for the attack upon Cornelia on London Bridge; this canard excited popular sentiment to such an extent that a guard had to be placed around the Dutch ambassador’s residence. I have taken a slight liberty with the composition of the council of war, in order to enable Matthew to attend it. In this period there were actually two councils, an ‘elite’ one comprising the flag officers alone and a council of all captains, the former meeting more frequently; but to have replicated this pattern exactly would have been to overburden the narrative, and I needed Matthew present at the meeting (actually held on 12 April 1665) when the Duke of Buckingham petulantly demanded a place by virtue of his rank.
Sir William Coventry did indeed possess a circular desk of his own devising; this was satirised mercilessly by Buckingham, his arch-enemy. The widespread belief that Coventry sold naval offices for his personal profit eventually led to a parliamentary enquiry, which exonerated him. The accounts of Clarendon House, the destruction of the London (together with the presence of women and many of Sir John Lawson’s relatives aboard her), the rise of the Earl of Falmouth, Lord Arlington’s scar, the Duke of Monmouth’s presence in the fleet and the French embassy of the duc de Verneuil and Courtin are also drawn from the historical record. Both the membership of the Royal Society and the experiment undertaken by Tristram Quinton are based closely upon fact; variants of the latter were actually undertaken by Daniel Coxe on 19 April and 3 May 1665, as recorded in Pepys’s Diary. My descriptions of the plague in London are also based principally on Pepys, together with various modern accounts, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and ‘fieldwork’ at the plague village of Eyam. Defoe’s most famous work, Robinson Crusoe, was first published in 1719; the ‘first English novel’ swiftly became a runaway bestseller. Francois-Marie Arouet, alias Voltaire, lived in exile in London from 1726 to 1729, during the time when ‘old Matthew’ would have been writing his journals.
Admiral Edward Russell, Earl of Orford, is not known to have served at sea until the year after the events described in this book. But his subsequent career developed exactly as Matthew describes it, except for the slight dramatic licence that I have taken of having him buried at Westminster Abbey, rather than in the Russell family mausoleum at Chenies where he lies to this day. The nickname of ‘Cherry Cheeked Russell’ was contemporary: the extant portraits of him display the characteristic clearly enough, even if he had not been the man responsible for the creation of ‘the largest cocktail in history’ (a historical phenom
enon described in minute detail on many websites). His atrocious spelling is apparent in all of his extant letters. John, Viscount Mordaunt of Avalon, is another character drawn directly from history; he was one of the leaders of the ‘Sealed Knot’, the secret royalist organisation of the 1650s. Other real characters appearing in this book include Sir John Lawson, Sir William Penn, Sir William Berkeley, the Earl of Marlborough, Sir William Petty, and of course John Evelyn and the Pepyses. Although I have invented the character of Ieaun Goch, the legends of the derfel gadarn and of the physicians of Myddfai are well known in Welsh folklore, and the dubious nature of many of the Welshmen recruited for the fleet during the Anglo-Dutch wars is confirmed in contemporary reports.
Unlike both his sons, the famously moral and monogamous King Charles I did not father a brood of illegitimate offspring. Nevertheless, several potential bastards of his, albeit markedly implausible ones, have been suggested over the years: these include John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, the notorious poet and rake, and, more plausibly, Joanna Bridges, who was living at Mandinam near Llangadog, Carmarthenshire, in 1648. Joanna was said to have been the daughter of Charles and the much older Duchess of Lennox; she subsequently married the noted churchman Jeremy Taylor. Her story, along with the alleged affair of the Duke of Buckingham and Anne of Austria from The Three Musketeers, provided the inspiration for the story of the uncertain paternity of Charles Quinton, Earl of Ravensden.
Finally, I am aware that I have done a grave disservice to the memories of Bastiaan Senten, the true captain of the Oranje at the battle of Lowestoft, and of the officers and men of the Mary, which played the part in the saving of the Royal Charles that I have assigned to the Merhonour (and which suffered even more terribly for so doing); like Matthew Quinton, her captain, Jeremy Smith, was knighted for his efforts. Senten’s ship behaved almost exactly as described in this book, earning her crew the profound admiration and respect of her opponents, and very nearly changed the course of the action by so doing. It is therefore particularly ironic that ‘Senten’, who died about half an hour after receiving the personal approbation of the Duke of York, was probably an expatriate Scot, originally named Seaton. I hope that this book will honour both his memory and that of the thousands who fought, suffered and perished on both sides during the Battle of Lowestoft.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I first began studying the age of the Anglo-Dutch wars, including the Battle of Lowestoft, thirty years ago, and it would be impossible to enumerate and thank all those who have contributed over the years to improving my knowledge and understanding of the events recounted in this book. Some of the greatest debts are to those who died well before my time. For example, the first detailed account of the battle that I read (and which still stands up well) was in The Navy of the Restoration, published in 1916; its author, Arthur Tedder, went on to become a Marshal of the Royal Air Force and Eisenhower’s deputy supreme commander, thus proving that turf wars and cutthroat denigration of those in differently coloured uniforms need not always characterise inter-service relations. Sir Peter Lely (1618-80) painted a series of portraits of the British admirals who commanded during the battle, and standing before the ‘flagmen of Lowestoft’ in the Queen’s House at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, provided much of the inspiration for my pen-portraits of the likes of Sir William Penn and Sir John Harman (although sadly, the museum no longer displays the entire series).
Returning to the more immediate and specific debts I incurred in writing this book: Frank Fox provided me with much valuable information about the battle of Lowestoft and in particular about the loss of the London, giving me an early sight of his excellent paper on the subject which is intended for publication in the Transactions of the
Naval Dockyards Society (www.navaldockyards.org). Thanks, too, to Dan Snow and Richard Endsor for a lively discussion about the presence of women aboard the London at the time of her destruction. Gijs Rommelse of the Netherlands Military Institute provided me with useful material on the Dutch aspects of the battle. As usual, David Jenkins ensured that my ships did not behave in impossible ways. Finally, once again I owe great debts to my agent, Peter Buckman, to my publisher at Old Street, Ben Yarde-Buller, and to my partner Wendy, who fights the corner of the female characters in the series with a tenacity that would have done credit to Cornelia Quinton.
J. D. Davies
Bedfordshire
‘Gowrie Day’ 2011
About the Author
J. D. Davies was born in Wales and now lives in Bedfordshire. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on the seventeenth-century navy. His Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare, 1649-1689, won the Samuel Pepys Award in 2009.
Copyright
First published in 2012
by Old Street Publishing Ltd
Trebinshun House, Brecon LD3 7PX
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© J. D. Davies, 2012
The right of J. D. Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–1–906899–04–6
