The Battle of All the Ages

by J. D. Davies

  All around us, the same story was being repeated. Our ships were wreaking havoc upon the enemy. Through my telescope I could see the Hollandia, Admiral Tromp’s flagship, limping away to leeward, severely damaged. Other Dutch ships were scattering before one of our fireships, unwilling to meet the same fate as their compatriot earlier in the day. Others still were simply turning tail and running.

  ‘Look there, Sir Matthew,’ said Lord Rochester, beside Musk and I on the quarterdeck, ‘De Ruyter comes!’

  Contrary to appearances, the young man had sharp eyes and sharp wits. There, coming up from the south with all sail set, was the great admiral himself, the Seven Provinces leading the charge.

  ‘So he does, My Lord. But he is surely too late – we have destroyed this half of his fleet. They are scattered and fleeing. And even if he does attempt to relieve them by attacking us, the Prince’s ships are still over there to windward. They can fall down on him from the rear, trapping the Dutch between them and us.’

  ‘Then have we won, Sir Matthew?’

  ‘Funny kind of victory if it is one, My Lord,’ said Musk. ‘The Prince gone, and poor Admiral Berkeley, and all the other good men who’ve fallen. All the bodies we’ve slung over the side, or who jumped and drowned in the night battle. The maimed men down in the surgeon’s cockpit, good for nothing now but hoping for charity from their parishes and begging on the streets when they don’t get it. Aye, a funny kind of victory. As they all are.’

  I said nothing, but continued to watch the unfolding scene. I had the leisure to do so: there was clear water around us, and no opponent within range. My men were lying down, resting and drinking beer. If De Ruyter threatened to attack, of course, the warrant and petty officers would have them back at their quarters in an instant. But the Dutch ships were not coming at us. The great De Ruyter, the invincible De Ruyter, was passing our sterns. Our men, and those aboard the other ships near us, cheered feebly.

  The Dutch were running for Holland.

  I lowered my telescope and smiled at the Earl of Rochester.

  ‘Yes, My Lord. Yes, we have won.’

  Chapter Eight

  THE FOURTH DAY, 4 JUNE 1666: 4 PM to 8 PM

  Officers Slaine and Wounded:

  Captains Whitty of the Vanguard, Wood of the Henrietta, Bacon of the Bristol, Mootham of the Princess, Terne of the Triumph,

  Reeves of the Essex, Chappell of the Clove Tree, Dare of the

  House of Sweeds, Coppin of the St George, all slaine.

  Sir William Clarke, secretary to His Grace of Albemarle, slaine.

  Sir Christopher Myngs, maimed, and since dead.

  Captain Holles, his arm shot off.

  Captain Miller, his leg shot off, since dead.

  Captain Gethings, drowned.

  Captains Jennens and Fortescue, maimed; Harman, hurt by the fall of a mast; Pearce, Earle, Silver and Holmes, all wounded

  Sir George Ayscue, prisoner in Holland.

  Sir William Berkeley of the Swiftsure, perhaps prisoner in Holland, perhaps slaine.

  Lost on our side, 6,000 men.

  Adapted from ‘A Particular Account of the Last

  Engagement between the Dutch and English, June 1666’:

  Bodleian Library, Oxford

  Battle is a strange country, a nightmarish land full of unwanted surprises, unexpected vistas, foul smells and terrifying experiences. One can be talking to one’s neighbour, and in the very next instant he is headless, his bleeding corpse slumping against you. The acrid, all-pervasive stench of gunfire is often complemented by the stink of men shitting themselves in fear. Men whom one thought stout and strong-hearted, like Lancelot Parks, are revealed by battle to be no more than gibbering half-men. Others whom one assumed to be weaklings and probable cowards, like Jack Rochester, prove to be veritable lions under fire. Above all, though, battle toys with the emotions. In one moment you can feel the greatest elation you have ever known: you are certain you have the victory, and there is no better, stronger feeling that any man can experience than the conviction that you have triumphed over your foes. That was how I felt when I saw De Ruyter’s ships turning, apparently fleeing the battlefield, leaving the Navy Royal of England battered, bloodied, but victorious.

  But no man can truly describe the feelings of a warrior who has the certainty of victory snatched away from him. In an instant, the weariness gnawing at the limbs after many hours of exhausting combat becomes unbearable. Wounds that have hardly been noticed are suddenly painful beyond measure. Above all, the heart seems to contract. It tightens, bringing on a kind of short-breathed blackness of the spirit. It is as if one has married the most beautiful woman in the world, only for her to turn to dust at the altar after the exchange of vows.

  That is how it felt, that afternoon of the fourth day of the battle, when I realised with horror what I was witnessing. The Dutch ships that had sailed past us, the Dutch ships that had been fleeing away to leeward, the Dutch ships that had lost the battle – those same Dutch ships were now doing the inconceivable.

  ‘De Ruyter is not fleeing,’ I said to Musk, as I watched his ships put over their rudders, and saw their yards and sails swing round as they came back into the wind. Back toward us. ‘He is regrouping. He is preparing to attack again.’

  For once, the loquacious Phineas Musk had no words in response. Not even the world-weary, sarcastic Musk could comprehend what he was seeing. His shoulders slumped, and he looked like the old, recently wounded man that he was.

  I heard groans from the gun crews in the waist and on the quarterdeck. These were men who had fought for four days, with precious little rest. They had given their all, and their exhausted bodies had nothing more to give. But somehow, they would have to rouse themselves one more time. Every man in the fleet would. For there, setting its course toward us on its new tack, was the Seven Provinces, the huge standard of Admiral De Ruyter streaming from the maintop.

  My officers reported.

  ‘Mizzen’s shaky, Sir Matthew,’ said Richardson, ‘but God willing, I can fish her sufficiently so she’ll hold.’

  ‘Very good. Carry on then, Mister Richardson. How much shot left, Mister Burdett?’

  The master gunner stood before me, looking sullen.

  ‘No more than four or five balls for each gun, Sir Matthew. More of chain, bar and grape. Barely twenty barrels of powder.’

  ‘Well,’ said Musk, ‘if we have a fifth day, perhaps we can lob mess-plates at each other.’

  The Dutch came on. Now the Defiance swept past our larboard quarter, Sir Robert Holmes strutting the quarterdeck impatiently. He was close enough to shout out without needing a voice trumpet.

  ‘With me, Matt Quinton! De Ruyter is making for the Royal Charles! I’ve got next to no powder or shot, but I’m damned if those butter-box cheese-fuckers are going to take our flag!’

  ‘Directly in your wake, my admiral!’

  We both laughed, though there was precious little humour in the situation. De Ruyter was no longer shunning close range duels lest our heavy cannon smash his ships to pieces. Now he was coming in close and hard, knowing it was his only hope of driving straight at the heart of our fleet. At the flagship.

  The Defiance and Royal Sceptre, together with Will Jennens’s Ruby and the valiant little Sweepstakes, formed a screen around the Royal Charles and waited for the Dutch to strike. A couple of Frisians came on first, but although the Defiance and Sceptre had little ammunition left, the Ruby had been with Rupert on his futile expedition westward, and thus had plenty of powder and shot to spare. She also had one of the maddest captains in the fleet: bragging, brawling, brave Will Jennens, whose wife (being even madder than he) had attempted to assassinate Oliver Cromwell, and whose niece became Duchess of Marlborough, effectively ruling the kingdom through bedding both its greatest soldier and its Queen, the late and unlamented Anna Regina. Will had managed to get his foremast repaired after our encounter with the Zeelanders earlier in the day. Now he placed the Ruby squarely in front o
f the Frisians and gave the first of them an almighty broadside, but the second veered away and raked him, smashing the fragile stern gallery and windows of the Ruby to pieces. Convinced he had defeated the Ruby and her captain, this fellow made directly for the Royal Charles, only to find the King’s Prick in his way. Undaunted, he made to grapple and board us, steering directly for our beakhead.

  ‘Sceptres, with me!’ I cried, leaping into the ship’s waist, sword in hand. ‘Cutlasses, muskets and grenados, men! Let’s give them a hot reception!’

  Carvell, Macferran and three dozen or so other good men abandoned the upper deck guns and ran to the forecastle alongside me. But we were not the first there: not by any means.

  ‘Brutus to him aloud thus spake.

  What work (quoth he) mean you to make?’

  Lord Rochester: who else? And who else in our fleet would have thought it appropriate to greet the Dutch, not with a volley of chain-shot and grape, but with his own translation of Lucan?

  ‘Shall my fleet idle range the coast,

  That you your marine art may boast?

  We hither come prepared for fight,

  Against our foes to show our might!

  Come bring us therefore sword to sword,

  Lay me the stoutest Greeks aboard.

  These words of Brutus he obeys,

  His broad side to the foe he lays!’

  The libidinous Earl illustrated each couplet with a barrage of grenados. His aim had improved somewhat since the first day, but I noticed a number of our men still hanging back in case the noble young poet accidentally blew them to pieces. Strangely, though, the men immediately around him seemed to revel in the unconventional leadership of Lord Rochester and his monkey: our ‘lieutenant’ had even been dressed in a miniature baldric, hastily run up somewhere on the lower deck, and was throwing grenados with abandon. Across the water, the Frisians massed in their own forecastle clearly had not the faintest idea what to make of it all. Their warlike shouts and obscenities died away before the spectacle of a madman spouting Lucan and a monkey throwing bombs at them. The hesitation proved fatal, for on the other side of the Frisian ship, Will Jennens was bringing the Ruby’s bows back round into the wind.

  I saw the glow of a linstock at one of the gun ports behind the Ruby’s beakhead, and knew what Will intended. His bow chasers, demi-culverins both, blazed and roared at once. He had charged them with grapeshot, the bags of musket balls, nails, and glass bursting as they struck the enemy. The men on the forecastle of the Frisian fell in their droves, some pieces of bloodied flesh even making it across the yards of water that separated us to fall on the deck of the Royal Sceptre. A small splash of Dutch gore struck my cheek. The Frisian fell away, and both the Sceptre and Ruby slowly edged our ways back toward the Royal Charles, now exchanging fire with a big North Quarter flagship. My quarterdeck came up level with the Ruby’s, and I could see that Jennens was bleeding profusely from a wound in the head which his surgeon was attempting to staunch.

  ‘Fear not, Matt,’ he cried, ‘I’ll live! Damned beef-witted hogen-mogens hit the least important part of me! And if Fresh Holles can live with his arm being taken off, I’m sure I can live even if this fly-bitten bum-bailey of a surgeon has to cut off my head!’

  And with that, Will Jennens roared with pain as the surgeon drove a needle into his scalp.

  * * *

  Shocking as it was, I reassured myself that De Ruyter’s unexpected charge was still suicidal. It could be nothing else. Prince Rupert and his ships were still to windward, most of them yet undamaged and with plenty of shot in reserve. They could come down on the wind, trapping the Dutch between us and them. The great Dutch admiral had surely made a terrible mistake. Just an hour earlier, he could have withdrawn to his own shore with honour, having fought us to a standstill. Now, we would absorb his brief onslaught; then, once the Prince’s ships engaged, we would annihilate him and his fleet.

  But as the Royal Sceptre and Ruby resumed their positions protecting the Royal Charles, a gap opened up between the ships immediately to westward of us, giving me a view of Prince Rupert’s ships sailing large toward us. Thus I happened to be looking directly at the Royal James when the disaster occurred. The Prince’s flagship was a fine sight, bearing down with all sail set. She, and the rest of the windward ships, would fall down upon De Ruyter, trapping the Dutch once and for all between the two halves of our fleet. We would still win. We were…

  The maintopmast went first, and that brought down the main yard and the great sail it bore. On its own, this double calamity would have been enough to disable the great ship for an hour or two. But her masts had taken an awful battering, and the effect of rigging being stretched and pulled apart by the collapse of the top half of the mainmast immediately pulled down the entire mizzen mast too. The Royal James stopped abruptly and wallowed, out of control, upon the main. The ships around her shortened sail; their captains were not prepared to attack without the talismanic Prince leading them.

  ‘Switch your flag, Your Highness,’ I screamed. ‘In the name of God, move to another ship!’

  But there was no sign of a boat leaving the James for one of the other ships. To this day, I do not know why Rupert, the bravest of the brave – aye, and often the foolhardiest of the foolhardy – did not shift his flag, resume command of his squadron, and bring it into action against De Ruyter. As it was, the Dutchman was emboldened by the sight of the catastrophe which befell the Royal James. A great red flag broke out at the foretop of the Seven Provinces. The bloody flag. De Ruyter was going for the kill.

  The next hour was a kind of encapsulation of all the little hells of the entire four days of battle. The Dutch came again and again against the flagship and the tiny group of ships defending it. If they had been determined on the first three days, they were doubly ferocious now, the bloody flag and the sight of the crippled Royal James driving them forward like a host of avenging archangels. The sound of gunfire was all around, but most of it was coming from the Dutch; many of the English ships, our own included, were running out of ammunition, and were either attempting to conserve stocks for a final, desperate defence, or else had already run out. And now the Royal Charles was edging slowly north and west. At one point we were within voice trumpet range, and with one Dutch attack beaten off and the next one not yet launched, Albemarle was able to bellow across the waters.

  ‘We’re holed below the waterline, Quinton, and we’re nearly out of powder. Keep on the larboard quarter – I’ve ordered Holmes to stay on the starboard. Cover our withdrawal.’

  So there was to be no fresh tack, no attempt to counter-attack the Dutch. The battle, the great four-day battle that we had nearly won so many times, was lost, and this time there could be no retrieving it. I felt no despair, no shame; only relief that, God willing, it would soon be over, and no more would have to die.

  I noticed that the fat old Duke was moving even more awkwardly than usual.

  ‘You are hurt, Your Grace?’

  ‘Grapeshot in the arse, Quinton. God knows what the court wits will make of that.’

  Perhaps in the heat of battle, Albemarle had forgotten that perhaps the most vicious of the court wits was aboard my ship. Indeed, he was standing nearby, well within earshot. That same wit duly smirked.

  ‘And lo,’ said the Earl of Rochester as we pulled away from the flagship, ‘in the midst of battle, a godsend to the poet. Arse will rhyme eminently well with either Mars or farce.’

  But soon I had more serious matters to contemplate, for the withdrawal was a catastrophe. Our retreat on the previous day, before Rupert’s ships rejoined, was an organised, almost impressive affair, with the fleet’s strongest ships in the rear to ward off the Dutch attacks. Now, though, our dispositions during De Ruyter’s last attack meant that the weakest ships were left at the rear of our retreat, and the Dutch fell upon them like furies. The Black Bull was taken, and the Clove Tree: Dutch prizes, these, so perhaps no great loss. But I saw the colours come down on the Esse
x, a stout man-of-war not much smaller than the Sceptre, and thus nearly as dreadful a loss as that of Will Berkeley’s Swiftsure on the first day. We could do nothing but watch from a distance: our duty was to protect the flag, and that meant we were among the stronger ships in the van of the fleet, unable to respond to the carnage astern. God knows how much more havoc the Dutch might have wreaked under their bloody flag, had not England’s unfailing guardian come to our aid: that is to say, the weather intervened. A little before seven in the evening, or two bells of the Last Dog, a thick fog came down. Under its cover, we ran for the King’s Channel and safety. Some tried to dress it in fine words, but there is no doubting what it was: a chaotic, headlong retreat. The Dutch did not pursue us, but they did not need to. Their work was done. England’s proud Navy Royal had been shattered and, worse, humiliated.

  ‘And now the real battle starts,’ said Musk, grey-faced and wheezing from his exertions during the great four-day fight.

  ‘The real battle, Musk?’ said Francis Gale, nursing a wound to his left hip that he had taken in our last fight with the Frisian.

  ‘The battle to assign blame. The Prince will blame the Duke. The Duke will blame the Prince. Parliament will blame the King. The King will blame Parliament. Minister will blame minister – Clarendon will say it was all Arlington’s fault, Arlington that it was all Clarendon’s doing. There’ll be riots in the streets as the mob blames whoever they can think of. Who ordered the fleet divided? On what intelligence? The country won’t be happy until someone swings for this.’