by J. D. Davies
Of themselves, these matters would not have been sufficient to give me sleepless nights many times, these last sixty years.
But there is another.
The fact is that I can recall exactly what I said to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, when we were alone in his laboratory at Whitehall on that fateful spring day in 1666, long before the fleet was divided.
‘…nought but madness. Englishmen do not like a double-headed monster leading them. I am minded to resign my commission. Let them send out George Monck on his own and see how the fat old turncoat fares. Yes, I am certain I will resign. Now, tell me of your uncle Tristram’s experiment with feeding mercury to a monkey –’
‘But Your Highness – you must not do that! You must not resign, sir.’
‘Quinton? You seem strangely animated in this matter. But no, whatever you say, I am set upon it. If I cannot have the sole command, then I will not go to sea at all. Monck can go alone. He brags constantly of how he beat the Dutch the last time, of how he will do so again. Very well, then, let him go and try to prove it.’
‘But Your Highness, think of the greater honour to your name if you were at sea! What if His Grace of Albemarle really were to trounce the Dutch once and for all, and you to have no part of it –’
‘Monck will not beat the Dutch, Quinton. Trust me in that. And when he does not, the King will not send his brother – his heir – to sea again, at least for as long as his barren Queen gives him no child. So he will have no choice. Once Monck fails, he will have to turn to me.’
‘Perhaps, Highness. But if I may do so with respect, sir, I would repeat the case. What if Albemarle, and Albemarle alone, destroys the Dutch? We nearly did so last year, as Your Highness will recall. And this year, we have more and better ships, while the Dutch letters say that they are even more divided and fractious than ever, with province set against province. Sir, how bitterly would you regret it if you were not there when we ended their pretensions at sea once and for all?’
‘You argue a good case, Quinton. You should have been a lawyer. But then, perhaps your uncle Tristram taught you well.’
‘That he did, Highness. And who knows, sir – once the fleets are actually at sea, all sorts of unexpected exigencies may occur. There may be an opportunity for you to revise the King’s instructions, and to reorganise the fleet to your own liking – to fly your own flag in your own ship, and to have your own command.’
‘Yes, a good case indeed. Very well, Quinton, I will think on it. Yes, indeed. I will think well upon it.’
That he did. So it was I, and I alone, who persuaded Prince Rupert not to resign his commission. In part, this was self-interest of the worst kind: I feared how I might fare under the sole command of the Duke of Albemarle, that ardent opponent of gentleman captains. But at the time, I convinced myself that it was also for the honour of England that the fleet should be at least jointly commanded by a prince of the blood, not solely by a former Commonwealths-man. I did not trust George Monck, who had turned from Royalist to Roundhead, then back again, and obtained a dukedom for himself in the process. I did not trust a man who had effectively ruled England during those frenzied months before the Restoration: who was to say that in the aftermath of a great and final victory over the Dutch, Monck would not use his popularity to seize power, oust the King and make himself Lord Protector? Perhaps thinking such thoughts was a kind of temporary madness on my part. But whatever the cause, it meant I was determined that Rupert should go to sea.
But I also persuaded Prince Rupert to snatch at any opportunity for an independent command of his own – that is, at any opportunity to divide the fleet. When that opportunity came, founded on the false intelligence of the French fleet and the army at La Rochelle, Rupert did indeed snatch at it; for if the prospect of defeating the Dutch was attractive to him, how much more glorious was that of defeating the French, and humbling the mighty Sun King himself! And, of course, the Duke of Albemarle, confident of defeating the Dutch on his own even with a depleted fleet, was only too keen to acquiesce. So by persuading Rupert not to resign, and to go to sea instead, I virtually guaranteed that the fleet would be divided; whereas if Albemarle had gone out alone, who knows what he might have done with an undivided fleet?
As I look into the flames flickering in my fireplace, I see the ghosts of all those who perished in the Four Days’ Fight: Sir Christopher Myngs, for instance, that most modest and unlikely of legends, and above all, my poor friend Will Berkeley. I see the men who died aboard the Royal Sceptre: Hollister, whose brains Kit Farrell blew out; Lancelot Parks, going mad and jumping over the ship’s side; Philemon Hardy, that worthy seaman, his head split open by the whipstaff; young Denton and Scobey, whose hopeful futures were snuffed out by a single cannon ball. I see them all, and when I am in the worst of my cups, or the blackest of moods, I blame myself for their deaths. Yes, others took dubious intelligence at face value, and others made the decisions. Certainly, Albemarle was duplicitous. Rupert was ambitious. The king’s ministers were incompetent; although, when are they not?
But I was the one who committed the original sin. I brought about the division of the fleet, the Four Days’ Battle, and the slaughter that ensued.
The very few in whom I have confided these thoughts tell me that I am being foolish, that my chance remarks cannot possibly have led directly to all that followed. But I know differently. An oak has to grow from an acorn. When a murder is committed, which is the greater cause: the ready presence to hand of the fatal weapon, or the fact that the murderer was ever born in the first place?
From my desk, I take out a fading yellow paper. A Satyr Against Mankind¸ it says upon the title page: a poem by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The noble lord has been dead for nearly half a century now, killed by the pox that was already eating into his flesh when we fought together in the Four Days’ Fight. I read his words again, and I wonder if Rochester somehow managed to look into both my soul and my future, during those days when we stood together on the quarterdeck of the Royal Sceptre. For his words describe exactly the nagging doubts that have troubled me for sixty years and more.
Then old age and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.
THE END
Historical Note
The plot of The Battle of All The Ages is centred on the longest, as well as one of the largest and hardest, sea battles in the entire age of sail. Between 1st and 4th June 1666, the British fleet under George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, and Prince Rupert of the Rhine, fought a colossal duel in the North Sea against the Dutch fleet under Michiel Adrianszoon De Ruyter, the Netherlands’ greatest admiral. The British were weakened by the fact that Rupert had been detached to confront a French threat believed to be approaching from the west, but when it was clear that this decision had been based on false intelligence, he was recalled and rejoined Albemarle on the third day. The battle featured some remarkable individual events, such as the loss of the huge flagship the Royal Prince (her commander, Sir George Ayscue, remains the only British admiral ever to have surrendered in action) and the suicidal attack by Sir William Berkeley and his Swiftsure. It is also one of the best illustrated naval battles of all time: the famous Dutch marine artist Willem van de Velde the Elder was present, sketching from a boat throughout the action, and his drawings, now preserved principally at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and the BoymansVan Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, formed an invaluable research resource for this book. The British fleet was ultimately defeated and forced to retreat into the Thames, having suffered the worst attrition rate among commanding officers in the entire history of the Royal Navy, before or since. But in an astonishing feat by seventeenth-century standards, the dockyards repaired the shattered ships and got the fleet back to sea within seven weeks, where they inflicted a defeat on the Dutch during the St James’s Day fight. This book follows t
he events and timings of the two battles very closely, although certain aspects of the sequence of events during the Four Days’ Battle, notably the bewildering series of tacks and passes on several of the days, have been simplified to prevent confusion and ennui.
Incredible as it may seem, the government of King Charles II really did base its decision to divide the fleet in part upon the intelligence from just one seaman, who had been held as a prisoner of war at La Rochelle and disastrously misinterpreted the purpose of the army that he saw being massed there. I have moved the home of this individual from Warwickshire to Plymouth for the purposes of the narrative, and have killed him most gruesomely, a fate which did not befall him in real life! Equally incredible, a gentleman captain – actually Charles Talbot of the Elizabeth – really did decide that the fleet he saw off Lisbon could only be that of France, despite the evidence of flags and ship design pointing to it being that of Spain, which is what it was. Again, I have relocated his ship’s landfall from Falmouth to Plymouth, but otherwise the sequence of dates of his sighting of the fleet, of despatching his letter to London, and of its appearance in the Gazette, complies exactly with the historical record. All in all, the sorry saga of how the fleet came to be divided in 1666 is a salutary reminder that ‘dodgy dossiers’ and the like have always been with us.
In writing this book, I have drawn above all on the work of Frank Fox. His stunning account of the battle, first published in 1996 as A Distant Storm and then in a very different format in 2009 as The Four Days Battle of 1666, is an example of naval history at its best. True, it is an account of a battle – now a somewhat unfashionable genre in academic circles, which are notoriously fickle – but its command of the political and logistical realities surrounding that battle is peerless as a demonstration of just how such an account should be written. His reinterpretation of the causes of the division of the fleet, which I have used as the basis of Matthew’s adventures in Devon, is a classic piece of historical detective work and revisionism, shattering long-held myths through a painstaking analysis of the evidence. It was Frank who overturned the long-held view that Rupert was sent west to prevent a conjunction of the French and Dutch fleets, and presented incontrovertible evidence that Charles II’s ministers were driven more by alarm over the perceived threat of a French invasion of Ireland. It was also Frank who finally laid to rest the old canard about Captain Talbot’s responsibility for the division of the fleet. Best of all, though, his book is written as accessibly and dramatically as any novel! I’ve been fortunate to be able to call on Frank’s friendship and expertise for well over two decades, and I know very few experts in their fields who are as unstintingly generous with their time and advice. Frank also commented on early drafts of sections of this book, saving me from a number of errors and infelicities, and demonstrated his customary helpfulness, gentle encouragement, and precise command of the detail. Consequently, there was never any doubt at all about the identity of the dedicatee of this, the fifth journal of Matthew Quinton.
With one exception, the fictional Royal Sceptre’s stations and actions during the battle essentially mirror those of the Fairfax, a ship of almost identical force; again, I owe Frank Fox a particular debt of gratitude for suggesting to me that she would be the ideal ship for my purposes in this novel. By fictionalising her role, and making Matthew her captain, I have excised from history the valiant part played by her men and especially by her captain, Sir John Chicheley (c.1640-91). I feel a certain degree of guilt for so doing, having written the entry on Chicheley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. However, Chicheley has served as one the principal models for Matthew Quinton since I first conceived of the character. Like Matthew, he served in the Mediterranean before the second Anglo-Dutch war; like Matthew, he held several commands in quick succession; like Matthew, he was knighted, aged twenty-five, for his outstanding conduct at the Battle of Lowestoft; like Matthew, he was devoted to the interests of his extended family. Unlike some of the other officers whose real lives I drew upon to create Matthew’s ‘CV’, they were even exactly the same age. Sir William Coventry, secretary to the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York, called Chicheley ‘the best of the young seamen’ of the age, which is as fine and appropriate an epitaph for him as any that I could conceive.
The one major exception to the principle of directly substituting the fictitious Royal Sceptre for the real Fairfax is the night action at the end of the first day of the Four Days’ Battle. The ship that actually fought its way through the Dutch fleet in such astonishing fashion, killing Admiral Cornelis Evertsen in the process, was Captain John Harman’s Henry; the part in saving her that I have assigned to Kit Farrell was played in real life by Lieutenant Thomas Lamming, who was similarly rewarded for his heroism with the command of a Fourth Rate frigate. In fact, the Henry’s escape was even more remarkable than the Royal Sceptre’s, as she successfully fought off three fireships, not two – but if I had faithfully replicated the third attack, it would have taken the ship much too far from the scene of the action to enable her to participate in the rest of the battle! I followed the same principle of directly substituting the Royal Sceptre for the Fairfax during the Saint James’s Day battle, again with just one exception: the Tholen was actually taken by the Warspite (but the flag captain of the former really was one Pieter de Mauregnault of Veere in Zeeland).
The Royal Marines date their foundation to the establishment of the Lord Admiral’s Regiment in 1664, and the force gained its first battle honours during actions like Lowestoft in 1665 and the Four Days’ Battle in 1666. Sir Peter Lely’s famous double portrait of Sir Frescheville Holles and Sir Robert Holmes, perhaps the most vivid depiction of any of the seamen of the Restoration age, can be seen at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and on the museum’s website. Holles is shown in right profile with a cutlass in his remaining hand, Holmes in a characteristically flamboyant turban. Other historical characters to appear in this book include the knighted British sea-officers William Berkeley, Robert Holmes, Christopher Myngs, Edward Spragge, and, of course, the notorious libertine and poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Wilmot really did serve in the battle, albeit with Spragge, and displayed remarkable – or, as others put it, foolhardy and near-suicidal – courage under fire, although not in the way I have described it in this book. (It is not known whether Lord Rochester had a monkey in 1666, or if he did, whether it accompanied him to sea.) The story of the funeral of Sir Christopher Myngs is taken, nearly verbatim, from Pepys’s diary. Perhaps I have wronged Sir William Coventry by suggesting that he forgot about the men’s offer to man a fireship; but on the other hand, there is no evidence proving conclusively that the offer was ever taken up. However, there is ample evidence for the Duke of Albemarle’s hatred of gentleman captains, and for the reluctance of both the Duke and Prince Rupert to operate in a duel command.
Although I invented Captain Jacob Kranz and his Duirel, the depredations of Dutch privateers on the coasts of Britain during 1666, and the previous history of the Dunkirkers, are matters of historical record. For the former, see in particular Gijs Rommelse’s excellent account, The Second Anglo-Dutch War, published by Uitgeverij Verloren in 2006. Similarly, the character of Ludovic Conibear is fictitious, although he is based loosely on Henry Heaton, the real Navy Agent at Plymouth during the Interregnum, and on an even earlier holder of the same office, the notoriously corrupt James ‘Bottomless’ Bagge. I wrote the account of Plymouth and the navy during this period, and that on its naval agents, for the New Maritime History of Devon. For the history of Sir Bernard De Gomme and the construction of the Royal Citadel at Plymouth, see Andrew Saunders’ comprehensive book, Fortress Builder (Exeter, 2004).
Finally, Edward Hawke, the unemployed young naval officer who appears in the Prologue, became one of the greatest British naval heroes. He won stunning triumphs at Cape Finisterre in 1747 and Quiberon Bay in 1759, the latter being described as ‘one of the supreme acts of seamanship in naval history’ (Ruddock Mackay and Michael
Duffy, Hawke, Nelson and British Naval Leadership, 1747-1805: Woodbridge, 2009). Hawke died in 1781 after serving successfully as First Lord of the Admiralty and being elevated to the peerage as the first Baron Hawke. One of the truly great fighting admirals, his insistence on aggression was encapsulated in his order that no ships were to open fire until they were within pistol shot of the enemy. His example is generally recognised as having been one of the most important influences on a man who, at the time of Hawke’s death, was a precocious young post-captain of twenty-three, roughly the same age that my fictionalised Ned Hawke would have been when he presented himself before Matthew Quinton. There can be little doubt that if it really were to look down from the Elysian fields, Matthew’s shade would undoubtedly have raised many an invisible glass of nectar to the immortal memory of Horatio Nelson.
J.D. Davies
Bedfordshire
April 2014
Copyright
First published in 2014
by Old Street Publishing Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2014
