Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  Monck nodded. ‘Aye. I intercepted a courier on his way here some weeks ago, mid-July, if I recall aright. I was out coursing. It was pure luck but I sought to keep it from Anne, until it was certain. Cromwell had nominated me for Scotland in place of Deane and I was to await orders but, having Anne in mind, I decided to resign, even though we might have both gone north after we had married. But then I decided to press matters and sent you to London.’ Monck looked askance at Clarges. ‘What else did Oliver confide in you?’

  Clarges met his gaze. ‘He knew of my previous service with the King and took some trouble to assure himself that I acted as your confidential agent. He holds you in high esteem and charged me with persuading you – if you were minded to persist in your purpose to relinquish your commission – to abandon the attempt. He said, in such a case, that I was to tell you from him direct to you that which he was reluctant to commit to paper, that he reposed the utmost trust in your person and that the Commonwealth must needs confide in your honour. He wanted you for Scotland but the Council did not; instead you are to be commissioned for the navy a General-at-Sea.’

  Monck said nothing to this, though he sensed the intrusion of Lambert. He had met John Lambert again in Ireland, during his inspection of his estates with Clarges; Lambert had been on a similar errand and the politeness between them had been brittle. While Monck was indifferent to Lambert, the younger man nursed an animus against Monck, and Monck was wary of him. Monck had exposed weaknesses in Lambert’s military ability prior to the battle of Dunbar and while Monck had quietly made up the deficiency, Lambert burned to find some humiliation with which to damage Moncks’ reputation.

  Clutching his papers, Monck withdrew towards a window. Clarges watched as he broke the seal and unbound the package, removed the oiled cloth in which it was wrapped, letting it fall to the floor, and began to peruse its contents. After a while he turned towards Clarges, appearing to emerge from deep thought. ‘So; the die is cast and they are to make a sailor of me.’

  ‘I am to tell you that you will be well supported.’

  ‘I am sure I will be,’ Monck replied sarcastically.

  ‘Shall you have need of my own services at sea, sir?’

  Monck thought for a moment and then shook his head, moving to a side table where a decanter and glasses stood. ‘No, Tom,’ he said, pouring two glasses and handing one to Clarges. ‘I think not. It is only necessary for one of us to be sea-sick in the interests of the Commonwealth. I have Will Morice to attend to matters here. I need you in London where you may better look out for my affairs both in correspondence with Ireland and, of greater significance, my dealings with the East India Company and those other investments that you know of. Besides that, you are better placed in London to promote your own affairs, to keep an ear to the ground in respect of matters Parliamentary and, when you have attended to all that, you must keep an eye on your sister and come hither from time-to-time. I would have her kept safe and if any design against us is set a-foot it will be in London and you shall better get to hear of it.’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Ratsford or not, I marry her on my return. She is desirous of a London wedding.’

  ‘You have Harbottle’s affidavit.’

  ‘Yes,’ ruminated Monck, ‘for whatever it is worth.’

  ‘It would tend to preserve your good name and I for one am willing to drink to that.’ Clarges raised his glass.

  THE NORTH SEA

  June 1653

  Monck rose unsteadily to his feet with a muffled oath as the Resolution lurched to starboard, a sea lumping-up under the great ship’s larboard quarter. In his youth, he recalled, when he had ventured to the Mediterranean as gunner of the Levant Company’s Perseus, he had acquired sea-legs worthy of the most experienced of mariners. Now he suffered an unsteadiness which, thanks to the spotted-fever and despite his taking the waters at Bath before going to Ireland, was unlikely to improve. Such a lack of sea-legs was unbecoming an officer of such a high rank as he now held. At forty-four he had become an old man, he thought with a grimly premature bitterness, and must necessarily submit to an old man’s infirmities. He was tired; it had been a long, noisy and trying day, his ears rang from the gun-fire, he was hoarse from shouting orders and he sought some consolation from its closing hours. The great cabin had been emptied of its modest furnishings when they had cleared for action, so he lacked wine or biscuit and had not the heart to disturb his man who was as exhausted as he was himself. The seamen had reinstated the bulkheads and the single curtain over the starboard sleeping place, but that was all and Monck had no desire to venture there for a while.

  Sitting on the bare wooden settee that ran – devoid of its usual cushions – across the stern under the windows onto the gallery, he thought instead of Anne. There was some consolation there, to be sure, for he had stolen some days’ leave on the transfer of his flag from the Vanguard to the Resolution and hurried west from Portsmouth into Devon. With Clarges in London and the old house empty of all save themselves and the servants, their time had been blissfully spent. In her last letter she had confessed to missing a lunar intervals; she was not yet sure, but she hoped perhaps later to send news for his private delight. He knew her fearful of another miscarriage, but the matter would be settled by the end of the campaigning season and she could have her London wedding.

  Nor was she troubled by some small further delay. ‘It will better secure our freedom from him,’ she had written in a letter he had received shortly before the Resolution had weighed her anchor from Spithead. But if the Lord gave, he also took away. While Monck devoutly prayed that Ratsford might be dead and that a life might be quickening in Anne’s womb, he profoundly regretted the death of the man whose bloody corpse kept him company behind his curtain in the flag-ship’s great cabin.

  The death of his co-commander, Richard Deane, left Monck alone, isolated, in command of the English fleet, its sole-surviving General-at-Sea. Mischance, the caprice of fate, providence, God’s ineffable will – call it what you will – had placed him in a sorry position. Once again his luck had not deserted him and he had emerged unscathed from the battle they had fought that day, and not for the first time since his elevation to this preposterous position of General-at-Sea, for her had fought his first sea-battle aboard the Vanguard in February, a long running action that had begun off Portland and ended off Gravelines.

  As the English had then sought to destroy a Dutch fleet attempting to force the passage of the English Channel with a large convoy of merchantmen under their wing, Monck’s had not at first played a glorious part. Initially, at the beginning of the engagement, his squadron had been too far to leeward – ‘loo’ard’ the sea-officers insisted on saying! He had been the junior of the three Generals-at-Sea. The other two Robert Blake, the foremost sea-officer of his age, and Richard Deane sharing – as was the Commonwealth custom – the chief flag-ship of the English fleet. His own flag-ship, the Vanguard, had proved one of the slowest sailers in the entire fleet and Monck had persuaded himself that he had, in his eagerness to make her effective, further over-borne her with too heavy a burden of cannon.

  His inability to get his squadron of ships into battle on the 18th February at the onset of the encounter with the Dutch, left Blake and Deane, supported by Admirals Penn and Lawson, to bear the brunt of the first day’s fighting. Initially Admiraal Van Tromp’s men-of-war seemed well able to protect their rich homeward convoy as it sailed up-Channel, but the pursuing English gradually wore them down. Astern of the opening gambits, Monck had ordered a press of sail so that, finally, his laggardly, ill-sailing and heavily armed squadron had caught-up with the enemy towards sunset on the 19th. Despite his Sailing-Master’s advice to draw off until daylight, Monck had brushed aside the man’s caution and ordered the squadron to ‘charge!’ The officers gathered about him on the quarter-deck had sniggered at the absurdity of Monck’s land-lubberly vocabulary, but they had approved of its sentiment. Once among what the English Jacks called ‘the H
ogen Mogens’ they plied their guns with a ferocious and savage efficiency. By this time the Dutch were tired and running short of powder and shot, making Monck’s late intervention decisive. By the 20th of the month eight Dutch men-of-war and over forty laden merchantmen had been captured and all of them ended the day wearing English colours superior to their Dutch ensigns.

  But that had been four months earlier and, during the battle, Blake had suffered a grievous and debilitating wound; he was invalided ashore. Matters now wore a different complexion, and although Monck was no-longer quite such a laughing stock in the aftermath of the present day’s action, he felt his own deficiencies keenly. In Blake’s absence convalescing, it was he and Richard Deane who had had the ordering of the fleet that very morning off the Gabbard Shoal and Monck had intended to rely heavily on his able and experienced colleague, bending his own endeavours to getting the best out of the Resolution’s gunners.

  The Resolution made another long leeward roll from which the uninitiated might have thought she would never recover and Monck growled. He had yet to rid himself of the landsman’s instincts and the landsman’s anxieties.

  ‘God’s blood!’

  He tottered across the cabin and then found the deck ahead of him rear up and threaten to propel him backwards as the Resolution, having finished her long leeward heel, began her roll back to larboard. Monck felt his body-weight like an encumbrance, and his legs ached in response. He had long ago conceived a respect for seamen if only because that querulous class of ne’er-do-wells could put up with this ungodly motion all the time. Or perhaps they were, as many said of them, near animals and endured it because they were insensible to it, even the officers. He thought of his Flag-Captain, John Bourne, and of his namesake Nehemiah Bourne, whom Monck had known in Scotland and had written to him of the first action in the war with the Dutch off Dover thirteen months earlier. Both were seamen of intelligence and could be no nearer an animal than George Monck himself; Monck dismissed the ridiculously prejudicial notion.

  Nor had poor Richard Deane been a man without sensibilities.

  ‘You will not believe me now,’ he had remarked as they had walked their joint quarter-deck, side-by-side, while the Resolution had stood out to sea from Spithead some weeks earlier, ‘but in a day or two, you will get used to it. Although the sea’s surface is not uniform in its undulations, it conforms to a pattern dictated by the wind. To some extent your body will anticipate the ship’s response and slowly you will acquire what we call sea-legs.’

  ‘You are right in one respect,’ Monck had conceded, grabbing the adjacent binnacle for support.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I do not believe you!’ It had not seemed to be the moment to inform Deane that he had once long ago served as gunner aboard the merchantman Perseus on a voyage to the Mediterranean. Monck now emitted another growl at his uncharacteristic want of energy. He ought to take a turn on deck but felt the unsteadiness in his legs too great a hindrance. He had made enough of a fool of himself over his lack of command of the jargon, and he remained wary of further ridicule. No, by Heaven! He would not have them laugh at him for his lack of sea-legs. Besides, they might think him drunk, and that would never do.

  His was indeed a black mood as he leant against the carved and fluted timber separating the handsomely glazed windows of the great cabin of the Resolution and stared astern, squinting against the setting of the sun. He was out of sorts. Was Macrae, his Scots physician, right? Had that damnable fever rotted his brain? He thought it must have, for he felt a resentment at this new appointment. It was not simply that he would far rather have been toying with his wife and doing his utmost to beget a son of Anne’s ample body, though he longed to be walking the banks of the Torridge hand-in-hand as they had on that last May afternoon before he rode pell-mell back to Portsmouth. It had been sweet, a stolen moment, but it could not last. The pot-bellied Dutch merchants who had stirred in outrage from their over-filled coffers at the passing in London of the Act for the Protection of English Navigation, had seen to all that.

  Damn them! Like thousands of his countrymen he regarded Dutch insistence upon monopolising the spice-trade with the East Indies as insufferable. Traffic in commodities was God’s bounty to mankind. Besides, he had his own money invested in the East India Company whose factors, he was old enough to remember, the Dutch had brutally tortured and executed at Amboina on no better pretext than they wished for a cargo of nutmeg and mace.

  But the fact that he himself – George Monck, a quondam pike-bearing artillerist – had become with a flourish, a General-at-Sea, and the agent of the English Commonwealth seemed to mock him. He was no sea-officer, for all the plaudits he had earned after the battle in the Channel. This matter of ships was beyond his learning and Monck, a soldier of the most efficient and painstaking kind, could not tolerate an existence outside the sphere of his own competence. The fact gnawed at him now that he had lost Deane and he quietly damned the Army Council and, in particular John Lambert.

  ‘That man intends to make an enemy of me,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘Aye, and accomplish my humbling.’

  Dutifully, since it had been Oliver who refused to accept his resignation, Monck had accepted his commission as a General-at-Sea without digesting its implications; now he suspected this was a trap, a means of disposing of him by allotting him a task that was beyond his abilities. No-one knew better than he that his success in the Channel had been a fortuitous fluke. Indeed, it may have sharpened the appetites of those eager for his dismissal. God knew he had enemies enough to want him out-of-the-way besides Lambert. The zealots that saw in his liaison with Anne evidence of a sinner fit to hang. The Army was full of such holier-than-thou misanthropes. One such, he suspected, served among the officers aboard the Resolution. Lawrence Godbolt was a crop-headed infantry captain, if ever there was one; a New Model officer commanding a company of soldiers serving at sea as marines. Godbolt! There was a name for a man who feared the Lord of Hosts with a zeal to match the very model of the New Model Army! Lambert himself had sent him, of that Monck was sure; a picked man to serve as spy in the train of the new General-at-Sea. The man who was not-to-be-trusted even though Oliver trusted him; the man who thought he deserved the proper credit for Dunbar, credit that Oliver’s despatch had given instead to John Lambert. But for the paucity of material reward, Monck could not have cared less, but Lambert believed he did and considered his judgement correct. Therein was the danger, for in Lambert’s prejudice lay the means of Monck’s downfall. With Godbolt to spy on him and pick-up every tittle-tattle of criticism – even that good natured chaffing that characterised the sea-officers and was at such a variance with the dour, fixed minds of the Godbolts of this world – could be made to sound like serious weaknesses in Monck’s command. A man of Godbolt’s mind could wring much mischief from a misrepresentation.

  Monck’s only consolation in all this had been Deane. The curious arrangement of the flag-ship bearing both of the fleet’s commanders had been, he thought, something in his favour. Deane, at least, had been a friend, a close colleague to consult and a decent man to boot, but now even he had gone.

  Monck attempted to shake off the gloomy train of thought. It had been a long, bloody and noisy day, the effects of which rang in his ears still, promising never to leave his tired brain and utterly over-coming his spirit. Must he now add this battle-fatigue to his gammy legs?

  Astern of the Resolution, flag-ship of the principal ‘centre squadron’ of the English fleet and its commander-in-chief, ship after ship trailed wearily in her wake, some with their spars shot away, some with discernible battle-damage to their upper-works. They bore little resemblance to a victorious fleet; even their brilliant ensigns, flags and pendants bore the tattered evidence of having survived a storm of shot. He recognised some of them: there was the Worcester, the London, the Marmaduke and the Pelican, all of his own squadron. He also thought he identified the Golden Fleece, one of the several hired merchantmen augmenting the State�
��s own ships. And there too was the James, flying the flag of his vice admiral, William Penn. Penn was hanging out some bunting – hoisting it, the seamen called it – which was just like Penn, attracting attention and no doubt fossicking over some error in station-keeping by one of the ships in his own squadron.

  Monck thought to send Penn a signal himself, telling him to work the James and her squadron up to join Rear Admiral Lawson who, by the chances of the day, now found himself in the van of the fleet. Penn should leave the lumbering Resolution and her badly wounded consorts to follow as best they could, but he desisted; Penn knew his business and would think the signal an admonishment which he did not deserve, coming not from Monck, but from Richard Deane.

  Few yet knew that Deane lay dead in his cot, his corpse drained of all colour through the mortal wound in his side. The chain-shot that had almost cut him in half as he stood alongside Monck on the deck of the Resolution had come from that first withering Dutch broadside the concussion of which had shattered the June afternoon and opened the engagement off the Gabbard Shoal. Even as Deane’s blood and flesh had bespattered him, Monck had admonished the men who had withdrawn from their posts to rush to the assistance of their fallen chief. In an instant, Monck had unclasped his own cloak and thrown it over the shattered wreck of his colleague.

  ‘Get about your business!’ he had snarled, drawing himself up and calling to Captain Bourne, ‘steady your helm, sir! Steady your helm!’ as if nothing was amiss. That much of the nautical argot was at his command and the words had had their calming effect. The fewer the men who heard then of Deane’s death, the better the day would go, for Monck knew of the whisper that had gone round the ship that morning and had noted the influence it had had upon the superstitious and the credulous among the Resolution’s crew. General Deane was not noted for his strict religious observances but that morning had been an exception: he had spent two long hours on his knees and the men knew of it. Monck understood nothing of the pretended science of premonition, but it was Deane himself who had told Monck that a grand Scottish gentlewoman had foretold his death in his next fight even as he assumed the office of Governor at Edinburgh in the room of the sick Monck.