The Mountain of Gold
Page 35
'It is easy to see what your mother and brother thought,' said Roger. 'To whom do you turn if you seek a son to continue a dynasty? If you wish to guarantee the birth of an heir? Why, to the most fertile man in Europe. Who else?'
' The King.'
'Your king, yes. Though God knows, my own runs him close in fecundity.'
'But—Roger, in the name of God, why would the king do such a thing?'
The Frenchman smiled bitterly. 'It is hardly a burden, in his case. But your Uncle Tristram, who stayed with me some weeks ago while journeying to a disputation at the Sorbonne, tells me that there are bonds of mutual obligation between King Charles and your brother that no man understands but those two alone.' This I knew well enough, but even so, to carry it to this—'The king seems to regard himself as repaying a debt to your brother. And the Lady Louise offered herself as the vehicle,' Roger continued. 'Strangely, she was one of the seemingly few women at court—no, in England—that your monarch apparently had no interest in bedding. But she became aware of the fact that a Countess of Ravensden was sought, and selflessly put herself forward for the position.'
'To wheedle her way into the king's bed, and into his affections!' I cried. But as I already sensed, she would not be the first, nor by any means the last, woman to exploit Charles Stuart's notorious weakness for a comely ankle or a well-scrubbed bosom.
'That is what is assumed.'
'But Tris cannot have known that—'
'Oh, her function was common knowledge at Fontainebleau,' Roger said, airily. 'We possessed certain intelligence that not even your esteemed uncle could ever hope to learn. Remember, Matthew, that France is a nation much richer than your England. Consequently, our king and his ministers are in a position to—shall we say, to pay judiciously for information and loyalty.'
'Bribes! Pensions!' I protested.
'I would prefer to call them retainers, I think, or expenses. Mais oui, we supply money to many in England. Courtiers, ministers, mistresses, members of that bizarre institution you call Parliament—it is just what we French do, mon ami.' He shrugged. 'We have an interest in ensuring that our neighbours think and act in—well, in as French a way as possible. So it is in this case.'
The truth, when it came, was like a hammer upon my heart. 'You are paying her,' I said angrily. 'She is a French agent.'
The sumptuous costumes that the Lady Louise always wore; the grand style that she always maintained; and yet, the apparent fiction of the great wealth from the estates inherited from two husbands. The paradox was all too clear, now I thought upon it.
Roger was uncomfortable, for he knew how much pain these revelations would cause me. 'She, and many others in your country, are happy to accept the gold that our treasury can offer them. That much is true, certainly.' He lowered his voice conspiratorially, so that his subordinates on the quarterdeck could not hear. 'Matthew, you and I, we are but puppets of the greater ones above us. So you were, in your recent foolish quest for that illusory mountain of gold. Above all, we are the pawns of two mighty and capricious men, Charles Stuart and Louis de Bourbon.' I recalled with a shudder that Brian Doyle O'Dwyer had once said something similar to me. 'Your king decides to father a child on behalf of one of his closest friends—so be it. Our king decides that the mother of that child should be one of his agents, who will thus gain a potentially useful degree of intimacy with your king—so be it.' He placed his hand on my shoulder. 'So you see, mon cher ami, to continue a campaign against the lady would be the height of folly, flying against the express wishes of the kings of England and France. For good or ill, old friend, you cannot bring down the Countess of Ravensden. Neither you, nor Tristram, nor Cornelia, should even attempt it.' He stared deeply into my eyes. 'But there are consolations in all this, of course.'
I could find no consolation in that moment. My brother, mother and two monarchs had connived in a conspiracy to foist a bastard heir on Ravensden, and I could raise not a finger against it. All I had, all I aspired to be, derived from my loyalty, and that of my family, to King Charles the Second; and no matter how shaken my loyalty had been by the voyage in quest of the mountain of gold, the simple truth remained that everything I held dear in life depended upon the whim of that crowned enigma. How could I reject a policy that was favoured not only by him but also by the cousin that he idolised, King Louis the Fourteenth? Nevertheless—'Aye, consolation,' I said with difficulty. 'The consolation that she has not bred.'
'Despite not inconsiderable efforts on the part of your king, or so our sources within the palace of Whitehall suggest. Oh, and yours, too—your friend Captain Berkeley wrote to you to similar effect, but I presume that letter miscarried with the others.' Roger smiled tentatively. 'As well, then, that our agents read it first.' He waved a hand as if to suggest that such blatant interference in the private correspondence of Englishmen was but second nature to the French. 'Now as experience tells us, Matthew, King Charles does not usually need to make any effort at all. His passing within a few inches of any woman is normally sufficient for her to produce a large, ugly black-haired child some nine months later. The failure in this instance is a mystery to all, especially the king, and a disappointment to some, especially your mother. So savour your moment, Matthew Quinton. You remain the heir to Ravensden, however ambivalent you may feel about that position. And there is your other consolation, of course.'
'Another—?'
He clapped me on the shoulder, and was at once the cheerful, carefree soul that I had once known as Roger Le Blanc. 'Your country will soon be at war with the Dutch, mon ami Why, I believe that you have played a not insignificant part in ensuring that this will come to pass—capturing a fort of theirs in the River Gambo, I hear? Their High Mightinesses at The Hague are greatly displeased.' He pointed out to sea. 'So should not a captain of the King of England be making all sail to enforce the salute to the flag upon those two Dutch Indiamen on the horizon? And even if they do give you the salute, might not that same captain find an excuse to seize them regardless, and seek to have them condemned as lawful prize?' Roger grinned broadly. 'Might not such a glorious windfall of prize money be ample compensation for Captain Matthew Quinton?'
I thought upon it, and at last, I smiled. 'Ample compensation indeed, My Lord d'Andelys. A veritable mountain of gold, in fact.'
Historical Note
The Mountain of Gold is based loosely on a true story. In 1651 the tiny royalist navy-in-exile was operating on the coast of West Africa, and its commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, heard rumours of the existence of such a mountain, far up the Gambia river. Rupert proceeded some way upstream with a force that included Robert Holmes, who was granted his first command during this expedition. After the Restoration, Rupert persuaded the king to back two expeditions to West Africa. These were both commanded by Holmes and were nominally under the auspices of the newly formed Company of Royal Adventurers, later renamed the Royal African Company. The first expedition, in 1661, was aimed at the Gambia and was explicitly an attempt to find the 'mountain of gold'; the second, in 1663-4, was a much more ambitious attempt to drive the Dutch from the Guinea coast. As Matthew recounts, these expeditions, and the creation of the Royal African Company, have been seen by some as the beginnings of properly organised British involvement in the slave trade, but in practice, the development of that trade formed a relatively small part of both the objectives and immediate outcomes of the two Holmes expeditions. On the other hand, the two expeditions—especially that of 1663-4—were certainly among the most important catalysts leading to the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war, although contrary to the accounts in some older histories, Holmes did not sail on to New Amsterdam, force its surrender, and name it New York; that was accomplished by a separate expedition commanded by Richard Nicholls. For the purposes of this book, I have combined various elements of the two Holmes expeditions. For example, the fort on St Andreas island was captured and named James Fort during the 1661 expedition; I have greatly exaggerated the strength of the for
t, which actually put up almost no resistance (Holmes' assessment of the size of the garrison provides one of the first recorded uses of the phrase 'two men and a boy'), but the circumstances of its debatable transfer from Courland to Dutch rule were as described here. However, the capture of the Brill and Holmes' assault on the Dutch trading posts took place during the 1663-4 expedition, again very much as described. I have taken several incidents directly from the manuscript journals of Holmes' expeditions, now held in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge: these include the 'red sails' off Cape Verde and the spontaneous firing of the musket during the march to the court of the King of Kombo. (There was such a potentate, although I have invented his gargantuan proportions.)
The character of Robert Holmes is based closely on the written record, notably Pepys' Diary and Richard Ollard's judicious biography, Man of War: Sir Robert Holmes and the Restoration Navy. As in this book, he tended to be known interchangeably by his military rank of major and naval rank of captain until he ultimately received a knighthood in 1666. Pepys' unjustified suspicion that Holmes had seduced his wife, their clash over the appointment of the Master of the Reserve and Pepys' mystified ignorance of buggery can all be located in the diary. I have also based the characters of Pepys' colleagues on the Navy Board closely on the accounts of them that he provides. Other real-life characters to appear in this book are the Earl of Teviot, Captain William Berkeley, John Shish and John Cox. Morgan Facey and Otto Stiel were also real people, and served in the capacities described in this book; but I have invented personal histories for them. Both William Castle's description of the Battle of Santa Cruz and Matthew's of the 'Great Storm' of 1703 are based closely on the historical record, while my accounts of both Old St Paul's and Deptford Dockyard are based closely on a number of contemporary or near-contemporary descriptions. 'Chips' remained a problem for the naval administration until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Battle of Deptford Bridge took place in 1497 in the manner described by Martin Lanherne and John Tremar; to this day, it remains a source of great pride and regret in Cornwall. However, I took some liberties by instituting a pope-burning procession in Wapping in 1663. These outbursts of anti-Catholic sentiment really only began on such a scale some fifteen years later.
My account of Tangier as a British colony is based on many sources, notably EMG Routh's venerable Tangier: England's Lost Atlantic Outpost. Fortunately, the seventeenth century River Gambia, along with its flora, fauna, social system and rumoured existence of gold mines or mountains, was described in great detail by several contemporary travellers: I relied especially on the accounts provided by Jean Barbot and Richard Jobson, published by the Hakluyt Society, together with the original manuscript journal of Holmes' first expedition and Zook's The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. The character of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer is fictitious, but it is not inconceivable that someone very much like him could have existed. Charles the Second's leniency toward plausible rogues was a byword—hence his treatment of Colonel Blood following the theft of his crown jewels, to which Matthew refers, and his decision to award the command of a royal warship to Bartholomew Sharpe, a genuine 'pirate of the Caribbean'. Many European renegades (about 15,000 at any one time, in fact) served in the corsair fleets of the Barbary regencies of North Africa, and both the adventurous spirit and ferocious fighting qualities of the corsairs were legendary. The attack on Baltimore in 1631, by no means the furthest flung of their attacks, happened very much in the way that O'Dwyer describes it, and is still remembered in that corner of County Cork; it has recently been the subject of a book, The Stolen Village by Des Ekins. Whether the corsairs were unscrupulous pirates preying on Christian shipping, or were merely responding to constant Christian duplicity and treaty violations, remains a matter for the verdict of history. The corsairs, and the British response to them, are covered in my non-fiction book, Pepys' Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89, and in Adrian Tinniswood's The Pirates of Barbary (2010).
The Seigneur de Montnoir is a fictional character, but I have based my account of the Knights of Malta closely on the record; for example, during the latter part of the seventeenth century French knights certainly dominated the galley fleet of the Order, with many of them later going on to high commands in the French navy. Further afield, French bribes were very much a feature of political life, and of the royal court, during Charles the Second's reign; several of the king's mistresses were in receipt of them. The king's treatment of the Earl and Countess of Ravensden was inspired very loosely by the story of his principal mistress, Lady Castlemaine (later the Duchess of Cleveland), her cuckolded husband and their son, later the first Duke of Grafton, whose paternity was debated for the first seven years of his life until the king belatedly acknowledged him and changed his surname from Palmer to Fitzroy. It would not have been unlikely for a nobleman like Roger d'Andelys to be given command of such a great French warship as Le Téméraire in the 1660s, but the French navy actually had no ship of that name until 1671. How the name (sans accents) came to be borne by one of Nelson's ships at Trafalgar, later becoming the subject of 'Britain's favourite painting', is another story.* The Masque of Alfred, which culminates in 'Rule, Britannia', was not written by James Thompson and set to music by Thomas Arne, who was indeed the son of an upholsterer of Covent Garden, until 1740; but I could not resist the modest anachronism of bringing the song's composition forward by a few years.
Mariners might object that my account of the near collision between the Seraph and the 'mystery ship' in the Thames flies in the face of the time-honoured 'rules of the road' for sailing vessels. In fact, there is little certainty over when those rules first became 'rules' at all, and it was certainly the case that in the seventeenth century, British royal warships expected merchant ships to give way to them, and to 'salute the flag', within the broadly defined 'British seas'. There were also many collisions in confined waters, and this element of the plot was inspired by the fact that one of the frigates on the first Holmes expedition, the Kinsale, was badly damaged in a collision with a merchantman in very much the same waters while putting to sea. Finally, the poignant epitaph on the grave of Henrietta Quinton actually exists: it can be found on a memorial in the parish church of Clare, Suffolk.
Acknowledgements
In writing The Mountain of Gold, I have been fortunate once again to be able to call upon the assistance of the other leading authorities on the Restoration navy. In particular, Richard Endsor and Frank Fox provided detailed information on the nature and capabilities of seventeenth century warships and were always willing to provide advice; our discussion about the best way to sabotage a Fifth Rate frigate proved particularly memorable! Peter Le Fevre assisted with other aspects of the book, and once again, David Jenkins ensured that my descriptions of the sailing qualities of square-rigged ships remained within the bounds of possibility. I am grateful to Chris Mazeika of the Master Shipwright's House at Deptford for providing me with a detailed insight into the layout and surviving structures of the dockyard. Servee Palmans introduced me to some particularly interesting recesses of the Dutch language, while my former colleague Andrew Wilson of www.classicspage.com followed up his translation of Harry Potter into ancient Greek by providing me with the Latin translation for Phineas Musk's introduction of Tristram Quinton.
Particular thanks are due to Peter and Rosie Buckman of the Ampersand Agency for keeping me 'on task', to my editor Henry Howard for his constructive and invariably helpful input, to Tom Bouman of my American publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for rigorous suggestions that undoubtedly improved the book, and to Ben Yarde-Buller of Old Street Publishing for his continuing confidence in 'The Journals of Matthew Quinton'. Finally, once again my greatest debt is to Wendy, my partner, both for her steadfast moral support and for her detailed advice on many aspects of the story. The female characters in particular owe much to her insight!
J. D. Davies
Bedfordshire, March 2011
Footnotes
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Epigraphs
PART ONE
One
Two
PART TWO
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
PART THREE
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Historical Note
Acknowledgements
Footnotes