The Battle of All the Ages

by J. D. Davies

  ‘Ah, Quinton,’ said Ayscue brusquely, in his strong Lincolnshire accent. ‘Good. Glad to see you alive. Splendid business, your night fight – a miracle you made it through. Your man Farrell is the talk of the fleet, you know.’ My fellow captains nodded appreciatively. This meant much to me: they were all veterans of the much-vaunted Commonwealth navy, bred to the sea almost since their births, and I was the only young gentleman captain in the cabin. ‘Anyway, gentlemen, to business. The Duke’s orders. We are not to tack again – God willing, there are to be no further passes today. The fleet is to hold this course, west by north. It’s to be a fighting retreat back to the Thames mouth. The Dutch reinforcements give us no other option, especially with no sign of Prince Rupert and his fleet. We and the strongest ships from the Red and Blue are to form a rearguard, fifteen ships in line abreast, shepherding the others into the river.’

  We four captains looked at each other. The same thought was in all our minds, but it was the most senior of us, bluff old Rob Clarke, who articulated it.

  ‘It’ll be difficult to bring that off, Sir George. The sands constrain our course, and once they bring their reinforcements into play, the Dutch can bring fifty to bear against our fifteen.’

  ‘And what if the French have slipped past Rupert?’ asked Harry Terne, a New Model Army veteran whom Cromwell had sent to sea. ‘By dawn, we could have eighty against our fifteen.’

  ‘You’re probably the last man among us who believes the French fleet is real, Harry,’ said Ayscue, smiling. ‘God knows who spread that malicious lie, just as only He knows why our illustrious ministers of state saw fit to believe it. But even without the French, the odds against us are grim enough, as Captain Clarke rightly says.’

  Ayscue beckoned forward one of his servants, who filled five fine Venetian glasses with wine. One of the perversities of naval battle is that huge masts fall, mighty hulls are shattered, and men are slaughtered by the dozen, but very often, the most delicate items aboard a ship survive a battering entirely unscathed. Ayscue handed a glass to each of us, then raised his own.

  ‘It has been an honour to fight alongside you, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Let us pray that tomorrow brings us good fortune – that it either carries us safe home into the river’s mouth, or brings us Prince Rupert’s squadron and victory. To the morrow.’

  We raised our glasses.

  ‘To the morrow.’

  Chapter Six

  THE THIRD DAY: SUNDAY, 3 JUNE 1666:

  DAWN TO 5PM

  The long disaster better o’er to veil,

  Paint only Jonah three days in the whale,

  Then draw the youthful Perseus all in haste

  From a sea-beast to free the virgin chaste…

  For no less time did conqu’ring Ruyter chaw

  Our flying Gen’ral in his spongy jaw.

  Marvell, Third Advice to a Painter

  We had stolen a march on the Dutch. At dawn, we could plainly see the enemy some six miles astern of us. As my good-brother Cornelis told me later, they had not expected us to retreat when we did, so had made their own turn to the north much too late. The winds were very light, but slowly and surely, the shattered English fleet was edging ever nearer to safety.

  The morning was a time of rest. Many men had slept for only two or three hours altogether since the battle began, their captain among them. But now, with no cannonading and little wind, hence only infrequent adjustments of sail, we were able to resume a semblance of normal watch-keeping. Thus the off-duty men were able to lay down on the decks and snatch some blessed, refreshing sleep, while the duty watch continued to repair the damage from the previous two days of fighting. Even Rowan, the elderly ship’s surgeon, emerged blinking into the open air, having been confined to his cockpit in the darkness of the orlop deck since the battle began. He had succeeded in stitching up Stride’s shoulder, and thus had somehow managed to keep the purser alive. Truly, the old man deserved the very long draws he took upon his clay pipe, his eyes closed as he took in the pleasurable tobacco smoke.

  They say that a captain and his ship are like lovers, and I can testify to the truth of that. Like a lover lying alongside his beloved in a bed, a captain instinctively senses the rhythm of the other’s body. Even in the depths of sleep, a change in the other’s breathing, or an attack of night-fear, will wake the lover in an instant. So it was on that third morning of the battle. I was in the very depths of a black, dreamless sleep, but somehow, suddenly I was aware that the Sceptre was picking up speed, and beginning to heel a little more to starboard. I woke, got to my feet, and looked about.

  ‘Wind’s getting up, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit Farrell.

  I looked up at the sails and flags, and saw the truth of it. Kit and Philemon Hardy, fine seamen and officers that they were, already had men aloft; as I watched, our white pennant unfurled and caught the strengthening breeze. All along the line abreast of the rearguard, the same thing was happening. But we could not put on too much sail, or else we would overhaul the smaller and, in many cases, badly damaged ships ahead of us. The Dutch had no such concerns. The gap between the fleets was already halved, and was diminishing by the minute.

  At noon, Francis Gale conducted a brief Sunday service, after which the crew fell to dinner, one of Prentice the cook’s tolerable salt beef stews. Thus nourished both physically and spiritually, the men were ready to return to their guns. It was as well that they were: by two in the afternoon, the Dutch had caught us. The vast demi-cannon stern chasers of the Prince and the Royal Charles fired, hurling thirty-two-pound balls toward the enemy, thus signalling the beginning of the day’s fighting.

  A big Zeelander was bearing down on us. I went down to the main deck, where the culverin protruding from the starboard stern port in the space where my cabin usually stood was manned by Polzeath, Tremar, Treninnick and three other Cornishmen, Olver, Dawe and Penhallurick. Burdett was moving from one gun to another, constantly computing angles and distances in his head.

  ‘Ready to give them a hot reception, Master Gunner?’

  ‘Aye, Sir Matthew. We’ve all the advantage in a chase – more and bigger guns in our sterns than they’ve got in their bows. And we can put our best gun crews to the task.’

  ‘Very well, then. So, George Polzeath and John Tremar, do you think you can shatter yonder Dutchman’s heads, so they have to shit over their ship’s rail?’

  ‘Reckon we can, Sir Matthew,’ said the minute Tremar. The huge, taciturn Polzeath grunted in agreement.

  ‘On your command, then, Mister Burdett.’

  The gun crew went into their accustomed routine, the burly Dawe ramming home the cartridge, Treninnick the wadding, Olver the shot. Polzeath, as gun captain, stood ready, the lighted linstock in his hand.

  ‘Give fire!’ cried Burdett.

  Both chasers, and those on the upper deck, fired simultaneously. The gun deck filled with smoke, but the Cornishmen were already controlling the recoil, Penhallurick already in position to swab. As the smoke began to clear, I went to the stern windows and looked out at the Dutch ship.

  ‘Well done, lads!’ I cried. ‘The heads are shattered, and plenty of the beakhead rigging too! Keep up that sort of fire, and they’ll soon be turning tail and running for their sea-gates!’

  The chaser gun crews cheered, but they and I knew that it was a pyrrhic victory. Destroying one ship’s heads was not going to stop the Dutch fleet. Their superiority in numbers was overwhelming. Unless we could get back into the river by the end of the day, they would catch us and destroy us.

  Scobey appeared, running along the deck, halting before me and offering a sketchy salute.

  ‘Beg pardon, Sir Matthew. Lieutenant Farrell’s compliments, and he thinks you will want to be back on the quarterdeck.’

  I went back up onto the upper deck. To either side, the other ships of our rearguard were blazing away with their stern guns. The Sceptre’s deck shuddered as our own guns fired again. But the attention of the men on the deck was not fixed on
the duel between us and the oncoming Dutch. Every man was looking southward.

  One of the yachts on scout duty in the distance had loosed her sails and was firing a gun. Our lookout bawled something, but I could not make out his words. On the ships to windward of us, men could be seen pointing toward the south-west.

  Scobey brought me my telescope. Kit, Hardy and I all peered hard into our eyepieces. There were tiny shapes on the horizon. White shapes. Sails. Many of them.

  ‘It’s a squadron, all right, if not an entire fleet,’ said Kit. ‘From the south-west. From the Channel.’

  ‘But which one?’ I said.

  I squinted even harder, staring at each new hull in turn as it came up over the horizon. Staring at the masts. Trying to make out the mastheads, and an admiral’s ensign. If it was the white of the Bourbons, and thus the Duke of Beaufort’s French fleet – including my friend Roger d’Andelys and his Foudroyant – then we were undoubtedly doomed. They and the Dutch behind us would trap us in a vast pincer. They would wipe out our fleet, leaving England open to invasion and conquest. But on the other hand…

  I caught sight of a tiny shape that could only be a flag. I steadied myself and focused intently on it, blotting out everything around me. For some time, perhaps entire minutes, it was invisible, as if the breeze had fallen away or it had become furled around the masthead. Then, at last, the wind caught it, and the colours streamed out.

  Red, white and blue.

  I lowered my telescope. ‘The Union at the main,’ I said. ‘It’s the prince.’

  They were already cheering on the windward ships. This set off a vast echo across the waters, each crew joining in as they realised what was happening. Down in the waist of the Royal Sceptre, exhausted men roused themselves, went to the ship’s side, waved, punched their fists in the air, and screamed with joy. Ali Reis, the Moor, had tears streaming down his cheeks. Macferran danced a jig with Berrington, a foul Londoner who hated anyone that was not an Englishman, but who, in that moment, loved the young Scot like a brother. Lord Rochester, his monkey upon his shoulder, embraced my young servant, Kellett; I prayed that joy at our reinforcement was the only thought in the noble lord’s mind. Further astern, though, Philemon Hardy, Kit Farrell and I hugged each other like long-parted sweethearts.

  With every moment that passed, the glorious sight became more glorious still. There was the Dreadnought, flying at the mizzen the flag of the ferocious Ned Spragge; there, the Revenge, bearing one of the proudest, most battle-honoured names that any English man-of-war can possess; there, the tough old Victory, commanded by the legend that was Sir Christopher Myngs. Above all, the bow wave surged around the cutwater of the mighty Royal James, the flagship, as she ploughed through the sea toward us. Aboard her, no doubt urging his ships forward as once he had urged his cavalry against Cromwell’s Ironsides, would be the man I had long held responsible for the death of my father at the Battle of Naseby. The man who, despite that, was now my patron in the navy: the man whom entire swathes of England had once looked upon as the devil incarnate, and one of the most famous warriors in the entire world.

  Prince Rupert of the Rhine was charging to our rescue.

  * * *

  Through the afternoon, we steered west-south-west toward the prince, who was sailing north-north-east to join us as swiftly as possible. The Dutch, realising that they were about to lose the advantage, redoubled their attacks against us, but our stern chasers continued to hold them off. Once we united with the prince’s squadron, the question of why our fleet came to be divided in the first place would be forgotten. All the suspicions, all the dark rumours about conspiracies and treachery, would be swept away. All was set fair to turn the tables on the Dutch.

  There was one cloud: a cloud which hung above the heads of our ship’s master and lieutenant, poring over the chart table next to the whipstaff. Musk informed me of an altercation between them, so a little before two bells of the Last Dog, I went down to see what the matter was. Both men pointed to a chart which was covered in a bewildering pattern of lines. It was as if the great Van Dyck had got drunk and attempted to execute a portrait by holding a pencil in his teeth.

  ‘It’s been impossible to keep accurate track of our position, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit. ‘We and the Dutch have tacked back and forth so many times, always out of sight of land, that no captain or master in the fleet is certain of exactly where we are.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Hardy. ‘I am as certain of our position as any man can be. We are here’ – he stabbed at a point on the chart – ‘some fifteen leagues north-east of the North Foreland. Well clear of the difficulty that Lieutenant Farrell perceives.’

  ‘That difficulty being, Mister Farrell…?’

  ‘The Galloper, Sir Matthew. Mister Hardy believes that both we and Prince Rupert’s fleet are well to the north of it. But what if we are not? What if the Galloper lies between us?’

  I stared down at the chart. There it was, clearly marked – the Galloper Sand. The estuary of the Thames and the southern North Sea beyond it is full of huge and dangerous sandbanks, and the Galloper is one of the largest of them all, a giant wall of sand that stretches for miles, almost due east of Harwich.

  ‘The Galloper cannot lie between us,’ said Hardy, emphatically. ‘Is Captain Kempthorne of the Royal Charles wrong? Is Sir Joseph Jordan, who has been sailing these waters for fifty years? Every veteran seaman in the fleet knows where we are! I am a Brother of Trinity House, Mister Farrell, and I tell you –’

  Hardy was never able to speak the rest of the sentence. The Sceptre stopped abruptly. The great hull shook. The timbers screamed in protest. We were thrown from our feet. My left shoulder slammed against a great timber knee, causing such pain that I could only assume I had broken it. I got up. Kit was on the other side of the steerage and seemed unharmed, merely winded. The helmsman, Teague, was picking himself up. But Philemon Hardy lay still on the floor, a dark pool seeping from the ugly gash in his head.

  ‘His head went straight against the end of the whipstaff, Sir Matthew,’ said Teague. ‘Smashed his brain open.’

  Perhaps it was for the good. Hardy had been a proud man, and he would have found it difficult to bear the humiliation of being so catastrophically wrong. I gave orders for Urquhart, the boatswain and an experienced ship-handler, to succeed immediately as acting master, and for a party to attend to the corpse. The remains of Philemon Hardy would be sewn into a hammock and stored in the hold, in the hope that we might get an opportunity to give him a more dignified farewell than that accorded to so many of the fleet’s casualties, who had simply been slung unceremoniously over the side.

  Clutching my shoulder and wincing at the pain, I made my way back up to the quarterdeck, followed closely by Kit. I looked quickly to starboard and larboard. The ships most nearly level with us, the Dunkirk of the Red Squadron and the ancient Saint George of the Blue, were similarly aground, as was the flagship, the Royal Charles, a little further off to the north-west. Our hull seemed to be at once swaying unnaturally and growling like some vast, indignant beast. And there were the Dutch, closing rapidly. They built their men-of-war smaller than ours, with shallow draughts to enable them to traverse the shoals in their own waters. If we could not get off the sand, they would batter our stranded ships into matchwood.

  ‘The smaller ships ahead of us would have gone over it without even knowing it was there,’ said Kit. ‘They are not to blame for not warning us.’

  ‘Disaster upon disaster,’ I said, pacing my quarterdeck furiously. ‘The fleet divided. Rupert sent west. Now this. Well, Francis –’ I turned to the Sceptre’s chaplain – ‘do you have a prayer to get a fleet off a sandbank?’

  ‘The Church always has a prayer, Sir Matthew. A prayer for any and every occasion. I was but now contemplating Acts, Chapter Twenty-Seven, where the Angel of the Lord assured Saint Paul that all those on his ship would be saved –’

  ‘Aye, Reverend,’ said the Earl of Rochester, ‘but was not Paul’s ship wrecke
d anyway?’

  ‘I had not taken you for a theologian, My Lord,’ said Francis.

  ‘One needs to know the Commandments before one can break them, Reverend.’

  Francis smiled; he was enough of a realist to know when he had encountered a lost cause, and the Earl of Rochester was most certainly lost to any semblance of the Christian faith. Instead, Francis brought his hands together in supplication, raised his eyes to the heavens, and recited the words of the Book of Common Prayer.

  ‘O most glorious and gracious Lord God, who dwellest in heaven, but beholdest all things below; look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws of this death, which is ready now to swallow us up: save, Lord, or else we perish –’

  The sails strained. The ship’s timbers groaned. Men looked anxiously over the ship’s rail, down towards the waters yellowed by the sand being churned up by our keel. There was one great, final shudder and then the ship surged forward once more. We were free of the Galloper.

  Francis turned to Rochester. ‘Such, My Lord, is the power of God Almighty.’

  ‘No, Reverend, in all truth. Such is the power of the rising of the tide.’

  I took up my telescope and studied the great ships of our rearguard. All of us had scraped the sandbank and got over it, even the large Royal Charles.

  All except one.

  As the rearguard gathered speed again, a gap opened between ourselves and the largest ship of all, still stubbornly stationary upon the sandbank. The huge, ancient Prince drew far more water than any other ship in the fleet, and she was stuck fast. The flags still streamed out from her stern and maintop, but the Prince, the pride of England, was on her own. And bearing down on her rapidly was the entire Dutch fleet. The enemy now knew exactly where the Galloper was, but in any case, their smaller hulls and shallower draughts meant that they did not need to fear it.