Patton stood up, still amused. ‘If I were, sir, I’d be in a constant stew, and I would also resign my commission. Fresh air, even in the form of a gale of wind, cannot compete with naval taletelling as an aid to slumber.’
Once they arrived at the table, Patton dealt with Harry in such a direct manner as to totally disarm him as well. What was normally an occasion of stiff reserve became instead an instant rapport.
‘I know of you, Captain Ludlow,’ he said, as soon as Griffiths had performed the introductions. ‘And everything I have heard of you stands in the credit column. In fact, having served under Lieutenant Carter, I count myself pusillanimous for not putting a ball in him myself.’
Griffiths had begun to blush. Like most people he avoided the subject of Harry’s court martial, and especially the name of his fellow duellist, like the plague. But the blood drained from his face as he saw Harry respond with a look that bordered on gratitude, as if he was pleased by Patton’s directness. He was, since it had removed that subject from all their minds with the speed of a surgeon’s saw.
‘Patton was the very first to spot trouble brewing,’ said Griffiths, giving his friend a look that was a mixture of admiration and concern. ‘Indeed, sensing that matters were serious, he took it upon himself to find out what was afoot, and wrote a report warning their Lordships several months before the event.’
‘You warned them of the mutiny?’ asked Harry, slightly incredulous.
‘Nothing so positive as that, Captain Ludlow. And how could I predict such a calamity as this? But I did tell them that feelings were running abnormally high, and that discontent was widespread. You will know of many a case where late pay or a particularly unpopular officer have caused a crew to refuse to weigh.’
‘Sensibly never referred to as mutiny,’ replied Harry.
Patton replied with a sharp nod. ‘And generally quickly settled to the satisfaction of all. Perhaps in what I wrote I didn’t manage to convey in words strong enough the different nature of the men’s grievances.’
‘But your report was thorough,’ Griffiths insisted.
‘All I know for certain, Ned,’ Patton growled, ‘is that it was thoroughly ignored. Still, deafness seems to be a very necessary component of high naval rank. Even your uncle’s not immune.’
Harry looked perplexed until Patton added, ‘He’s nephew to Admiral Colpoys.’
‘Sorry, I’d forgotten your relations.’
Griffiths nodded, then his face turned sad. ‘I was surprised too. It wasn’t just Bridport and Gardner. I have the London, Harry, my uncle’s flagship. I saw nothing, and neither did my officers. Of course we knew there was discontent, that things were made worse by the addition to the crews of quota men. But mutiny, and on such a scale.’
‘I only know the bones of the thing,’ said Harry, unable to conceal his eagerness, as he glanced at both naval officers, ‘and I’m sure you’ve had to recount your tale dozens of times. If you could bear to repeat yourself, Captain Patton, I’d be much obliged.’
‘Happily, Captain Ludlow. What else is there to talk about?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THERE WAS so much which didn’t need saying, of course. About the sailors wages, nineteen shillings a lunar month for a seaman, which had been set in the Commonwealth. Of a system that, under the disguise of necessary deductions, could deprive them of up to a third of that sum. The remainder was often up to two years in arrears, and then only paid out in tickets redeemable at the port at which the ship had been commissioned.
Unable to go ashore in wartime, for fear that they’d desert, the crews usually sold their pay warrants to Jews and bumboat women at a discount, further depleting the total that they could pass on to their dependants. And that all took place at a time when they were being fed short measures of poor and sometimes completely rotten food, cheated by pursers whose avarice was legendary, under the command of officers who ranged from enlightened saints through common tyrants to quite a few who when it came to the lash were downright madmen.
So a sympathy for the sailor’s plight was taken as read by Patton as he outlined the series of events that had led to the present impasse. It was as if the people involved, and the series of actions that had unfolded, had been put specially in place to frustrate the legitimate demands of the seamen; men who when they’d originally protested had taken good care to affirm their loyalty to King and Country, and their willingness to do battle with the French fleet should it emerge from Brest.
‘Howe’s the main culprit, if you exclude the system of abuse itself. He should have retired in ’94, after the Glorious First of June. Bridport has his faults, but he’s not helped by having a titular superior who never even comes to Portsmouth, let alone goes to sea. The men sent their original petitions to Black Dick well over a month ago, while he was taking the waters in Bath. He took his time about reading them, then passed them on to the Admiralty without comment. As a result, Lord Spencer didn’t even look at the damn things. Bridport had taken the fleet to Brest and back in the meantime. When the men returned they must have expected some response. Finding none only made matters worse.’
Patton, picking up on the rumours, had gone to visit each ship in turn. There he found men in groups, whispering, gesticulating, and clearly angry. ‘Yet they obeyed any order they were given, Ludlow. That was part of the plan, I think, and it was a shrewd one; to do nothing that would bring punishment down on their heads.’
‘It was damned embarrassing, Harry,’ said Griffiths. ‘The feeling that you were losing control. Some of my Londons even trespassed beyond the mainmast and stood yattering on the quarterdeck.’
James couldn’t resist a breathless, ‘Never.’ Harry and Patton spotted the irony, but not Griffiths, who was too taken with his own remembered woes. ‘I thought I ran a good, tight ship.’
‘I told Lord Bridport of my conclusions,’ Patton continued. ‘He wrote to Whitehall to warn them. Only then did they tell him of the petitions that Howe had received. I’ve never seen Bridport so angry, and he was right to be, having been left in ignorance of something it was his responsibility to contain. He’s not as popular as Howe, few are with the men. But he is respected, and I’m sure if he’d had prior warning he could have headed things off.’
Patton paused for a moment, taking a deep breath to contain his own anger at what he was now relating. ‘The damn fools then compounded that sin, and cut the rug from under his feet, with instructions that the best way to calm things was to get the crews back to sea. Bridport knew it to be a foolish idea, but still passed the orders on. That’s when matters came to a head. The men aboard Royal Sovereign refused to weigh, though I believe it was touch and go till the Queen Charlottes manned the foremast shrouds to cheer. Then it was red flags at the mizzen and boats sent off round the whole anchorage. Before the day was out we had what you see now. The very first fleet mutiny the country has ever known to contend with.’
‘My Uncle Colpoys, who can be short-tempered, tried to stop delegates coming aboard from the other ships, but Bridport ordered him to desist. You should have heard him curse. Thank God the men didn’t hold it against him.’
Patton had been reasonably matter-of-fact till now, containing his own emotions well, even though what he was describing was for every naval officer a catastrophe. For the first time he showed a trace of temper.
‘You know as well as I do, Ned, that the crew don’t hold you or your uncle responsible. Damn it, they don’t even hold their fleet commanders to account. They think the whole system is rotten.’
Griffiths’s face hardened, showing for the first time the kind of determination that was required to command a 100-gun ship like the London. ‘I should know if my men are conspiring to disobey me.’
‘Is it a conspiracy?’ asked James. ‘We heard a rumour that there’s a French involvement.’
‘In one sense, yes,’ replied Patton, avoiding Griffiths’s angry look. ‘But I, for one, am convinced that despite that the legitimate grievan
ces of the men are sufficient cause. They don’t need Jacobins or seditious combinations to inspire them to act, even if it looks on the surface to be that way.’
‘Why?’ demanded Harry.
‘Every ship-of-the-line sent in the same petition,’ said Griffiths, with a deep frown. ‘The same list of demands, almost to the letter in the identical nature of the wording.’
‘That smacks of some kind of collusion, surely,’ said Harry.
Patton’s face creased with worry. ‘I can’t be sure that there’s no outside influence. But if there is, I am certain that it’s not French inspired.’
‘Again I must ask why,’ Harry persisted.
‘The men are loyal,’ snapped Patton. ‘Every ship has sworn that should the enemy put to sea, so will they.’
‘How could anyone ever have doubted that?’ Harry replied, taking care not to sound too smart. ‘But it still begs the question. If it’s not a Jacobin plot, how, without some kind of combination, did they manage to organise it themselves? Sailors can’t gather in large groups without being noticed. And I can’t believe a mutiny of this magnitude was planned by conversations held through open gun ports.’
Patton managed a grim smile. ‘No, Ludlow. This was done ashore, and not by the common seamen. The petty officers took the lead, and if there is any kind of seditious gathering, like a Corresponding Society, then that is where it lies.’
‘What are they demanding?’ asked James.
‘For themselves, nothing,’ replied Patton, his eyes continuing to hold Harry’s steadily. ‘Which gives them great moral authority.’
Griffiths picked up the thread as soon as Patton paused for breath, his voice full of the suspicion which, despite hints to the contrary, clearly troubled him.
‘It’s uncanny. Every delegate in the fleet, and there are some thirty of them, knows what to do and say, even when the case is altered in discussion. They showed a discipline from the very outset which would make you proud were it better directed. Mind, I am less convinced than Patton here that there are no French agents involved. The only thing that makes me think he might be right is the fact that there has been no bloodshed.’
Patton took up the tale again, clearly intent, by the look he gave Griffiths, to lay any notion of a conspiracy directed by outside agencies.
‘It’s the very opposite of bloodshed. Initially, not one officer was so much as threatened with violence, even those hard-horse floggers who deserve it. Strict order was imposed to the extent that they even laid the lash to the back of one of their own for being drunk. And when the frigates tried to join the mutiny they were told to leave matters to the delegates from the capital ships, to get to sea and watch out for the enemy fleet, an injunction they only obeyed when they were actually threatened with a broadside.’
Harry turned to Griffiths. ‘Why then, Ned, do you still have doubts?’
‘Two delegates came from every ship to the first meeting, a recipe for chaos normally.’
‘They were the very best of the fleet before the mast,’ insisted Patton. ‘Quartermasters’ mates, yeomen of the sheets and the like, though I admit even they had a self-control that astounded everyone, and stated the demands, even clarified them, without any kind of consultation.’
Griffiths reacted with some anger. ‘It beggars belief that a group that size could agree so readily to sudden proposals without some guiding authority.’
Through the arguments of these two men the details of the story unfolded, and Harry could not help but think that they’d brought it on themselves. The two men before him were good officers, Patton especially so. But they had contrived to live with a system in which the endemic abuses were tolerated. Any dissent should have come from their ranks, not those of the lower deck. The fear of losing employment, of existing on half-pay, terrified every commissioned officer.
The Admiralty, even when they’d been told that mutiny was possible, had ordered Bridport to send eight of the line down to St Helen’s, the usual starting place for a cruise to blockade Brest. The Admiral had passed the order on to his second in command, Sir Alan Gardner, even if he doubted the wisdom of the instruction or that the men would obey. That said more than anything about the hierarchy that he himself had once served.
Did they not realise that the petty officers, ex-seamen and closer to the lower deck than officers, probably sympathised with their one-time comrades? Even if they didn’t the sullenness produced by the conditions of service was something they lived with every day of their lives. They were allowed ashore, could meet and talk without being overheard, had ample time and good cause to lay the plans that had brought matters to a head. Did it need anyone from outside to fire them up to act?
The mighty Board of Admiralty, who should have known what was going on, had indeed been forced to leave London for Portsmouth. Patton was now describing how they offered concessions, quite naturally hedging the whole thing around with unacceptable conditions.
‘Spencer refuses to meet with them,’ Patton continued, ‘so Gardner, Colpoys, and Admiral Pole took the Board’s first offer to the delegates. When they were rebuffed Gardner completely lost control and threatened to hang every fifth man in the fleet.’
Griffiths shook his head slowly, though whether his confusion related to the folly of the men or of the messengers, he didn’t say. ‘Things looked set to turn nasty. The flag officers, my uncle included, were bundled off the ship. But before that happened the men restated their grievances, and added a unanimous demand, without even discussing it, for the inclusion of a Royal Pardon.’
There was a moment’s silence before Harry spoke. ‘That must have been worked out in advance, options discussed, not necessarily by one individual, but several men, a hard core who have the same aims as the mass, but a clearer view. Perhaps it’s even one individual.’
‘If you could find him,’ said Griffiths, ‘you’d earn a dukedom. Never mind Jervis and Nelson and that folderol they had at St Vincent.’
‘I thought they’d won a substantial victory,’ James interrupted, clearly perplexed.
Harry gave him a knowing look, one that tried to convey the fact that any exploit of the Mediterranean command would receive scant praise from the Channel Fleet. And neither would praise the North Sea contingent, shivering at the Nore, the Downs, and Yarmouth, facing an enemy, the Dutch, that in quality of seamanship and fighting spirit surpassed anything that came out of France or Spain. Griffiths, ignoring James’s interruption, had kept talking, showing his confusion as he did so, unable to accept a conspiracy one minute, convinced it existed the next. Harry knew that in the end it mattered little. It was painfully obvious that this affair had to be resolved.
‘If it’s not stopped, Harry,’ Griffiths concluded, ‘Billy Pitt will be forced to sue for peace.’
‘Surely not,’ James said.
Patton gave him a hard look, one that was clearly intended to indicate that he, a civilian, could not comprehend the scale of the problem. But he was too polite to actually say anything. Not so Ned Griffiths, who pointed out in a harsh tone that the fleet was everything; that the mutiny could spread to the Nore, and that it would infect every fleet the country had at sea if it wasn’t either checked or satisfied. As he spoke, he got more and more heated, and Harry observed that James was beginning to bridle.
‘I might be tempted by a dukedom, Ned,’ he said, interrupting the lecture.
‘Harry,’ James responded, a note of alarm in his voice. He was well aware of his brother’s penchant for interfering in things that were none of his affair. Harry, who had a dangerous look in his eye, suddenly grinned at him.
‘Never fear, brother. If I could find the hand that guided this, I’d shake it as long as it wasn’t French. From what I can hear the men have asked for no more than their due.’
Both officers looked confused, not willing to agree but as sure as Harry that what he was saying was nothing but the plain truth.
‘And what kind of government is it,’ Harry added, �
��that can give the army, which has suffered nothing but humiliation, a rise in pay, and ignore a navy which has won two fleet actions in the last three years?’
‘Hear, hear,’ said both Griffiths and Patton, in voices loud enough to make nearby heads turn in their direction.
They talked on, mulling over causes and effects and how they had been achieved. Partly, as Griffiths was forced to acknowledge, it was the present composition of the fleet. At the start of the war the navy had recruited or press-ganged sailors, men used to the rough ways of the sea, but that had changed when they could no longer cope with the massive expansion brought on by the nature of the conflict. The levy placed on all the inland towns, demanding a quota of men for the fleet, had changed the nature of the crews. The proportion of landsmen in each vessel had increased, so that in some newly commissioned ships they were close to being the majority.
That had brought into a strictly ordered world, through convictions in courts, debtors’ gaols, and threats of transportation, men who could read and write, including the odd person with legal training. This was certainly borne out by the nature of one of the petitions, a copy of which Griffiths passed to Harry. There was none of the usual arcane wording of the common seaman’s plea. These were laid out in clear, cogent English, ordered and precise.
‘This could have been drawn up in Wapping by a hundred-guinea attorney,’ said James, after he’d read it.
Patton snorted. ‘And to think that Black Dick Howe read them all, and felt no cause for alarm. The wording alone should have alerted the old goat.’
‘And the present state of things?’
‘Rumblings at the Nore, with no hint of difficulties at the Downs or Yarmouth, though rumours have come from Plymouth that Sir Roger Curtis’s squadron refused to sail to anywhere but Pompey. It seems that on each station they’re waiting for the Spithead delegates to earn them their demands.’
‘They have their Royal Pardon,’ Griffiths added. ‘Spencer might be prickly in the article of his pride, but he showed great application on that. He had it signed by the King in twenty-four hours, which at least got two-thirds of the fleet down to St Helen’s. They were offered twenty-two shillings for seamen, which was acceptable until the Admiralty refused to extend it to recently recruited landsmen.’
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