Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck

by Richard Woodman

  ‘She sought to put fear into me by the second-sight,’ Deane had admitted when they had dined two days ago in the Resolution’s cabin and he had been relating the curiosity. ‘Thinking my next fight to have been in Scotland, she relished the forecast of my end at the hand of a Scotchman.’ He had given Monck an odd smile, then added in compliment to his colleague, ‘but thou hadst left the country so quiet and orderly that no Scot could find reason to raise so much as a muck-rake against our authority and I thereby disappointed the lady’s expectation.’

  ‘Then I should think nothing of it, friend,’ Monck had replied. ‘I have no truck with witch-craft and since we shall stand alongside each other I am as likely to take an enemy shot as thou art.’

  Deane had returned a non-committal grunt. It had been clear to Monck that the matter preyed on Deane’s mind and his unusual devotions earlier that very morning had proved eloquent of Deane’s state-of-mind, even if it fell short of presentiment. And there had been that other rather sinister circumstance: the ruination of Deane’s doublet which, the night before the battle, he had discovered nibbled by rats. The tattered left breast had been the very spot where the Dutch chain-shot had, a few hours later, torn apart Deane’s body. ‘Poor Dick…’ Monck murmured, wondering at the coincidence. Deane had not struck Monck as either a credulous or a superstitious man, yet he did seem to have received an intimation of his coming doom. It was a profoundly troubling thought.

  Nor would Deane have been so likely to have met his death had not the conduct of some of Lawson’s captains proved shameful. Despite the careful drafting of new instructions over which both Monck’s and Deane’s heads had nodded in the candlelight before they had left Spithead, there had been those captains who had hung back and failed to support Lawson as he strove to bring the Dutch to action in the light airs then prevailing. It had therefore fallen to the sluggish Resolution to crowd on every stich of canvas she could spread to catch the fitful breeze and follow as Tromp – with that supreme control over his ships that the English could only envy – put about to hasten to De Ruiter’s assistance. Thankfully the captains of the English centre squadron showed no such pusillanimity as those under Lawson; they at least had clung close to the Resolution. Thankfully, too, Penn’s squadron had not lagged far behind, but then…

  ‘Damn it,’ Monck said to himself, tearing off his wig and flinging it aside. ‘Sixteen…sixteen!’

  Hastening to Lawson’s assistance, the Resolution had come under the fire of no less than sixteen of the enemy and thus had poor Deane’s fate been sealed. Before the reverberating concussion of that storm of shot had subsided, the whirr and sickening thwack of the chain-shot had torn Richard Deane apart.

  Now everything devolved upon himself – George Monck – the man who, despite his high appointment, had been ridiculed by even the common sailors who had heard him shout: ‘Board them! Board them!’ when his Flag-Captain had called for starboard helm in his frustrated attempt to carry his flag-ship into action alongside General Blake off Portland. Monck was convinced that it was such nonsense that Godbolt had been sent to listen for.

  That long action against Tromp in February had given the Dutch a bloody nose but revealed serious weaknesses in the manoeuvrings of the English ships. Despite these short-comings and the English captures of Dutch men-of-war as prizes, Tromp had carried off the greater part of the Dutch convoy, laden with the rich spices of the East Indies.

  Monck had survived his seamen’s cheerful contempt at his own shortcomings where naval matters were concerned, not least by his apparent indifference to danger when under fire. What mattered to him was the outcome, not the manner of its doing, provided that was executed with competence. In any case he had afterwards earned the respect of his detractors by his efforts to comfort the wounded when the fleet finally anchored. Here his energy and skill in organisation had brought much-needed relief. The fleet’s surgeons had been mustered on Monck’s express orders and many poor fellows had been kindly used who would otherwise have been cast ashore on the charity of whatever parish in which they found themselves deposited. Accustomed to the rough Puritan compassion of the New Model Army towards its common soldiery, Monck had found utterly unacceptable this casual disposal of mutilated seamen who had served their country and been the losers therein. He had noticed that although his officers and ratings still looked at him askance, he afterwards read something other than a mild amusement in their eyes. Now Godbolt had come among them to work his own mischief.

  Sent with Deane to Portsmouth to fit out another fleet, Monck had boarded his new flag-ship, the Resolution, and set about his work with his customary energy. Keen on his cannon he had, he thought now, again over-borne the poor old Resolution with a greater weight-of-metal than she could comfortably bear. Had he thereby compounded her already indifferent sailing qualities? If he had, she had given a good account of herself earlier in the day and that early enemy broadside, which had carried out of his body the bowels and spirit of Richard Deane, had been repaid with generous interest.

  Sadly Monck turned back into the darkening cabin he had so recently shared with his co-commander-in-chief. Crossing the deck he drew aside the curtain screening the starboard bed-place and stared at the white-face of Richard Deane as he lay in his swinging cot. There lay the man who had sent guns to Monck’s assistance in Scotland and who had taken upon himself, certainly as far as Monck was concerned, the greater burden of actual command of the present fleet in its manoeuvres against Maarten Harpertzoon Van Tromp. Monck sighed; he had liked Deane and had leaned upon him to make good the deficiencies – the many deficiencies – Monck had in the matter of seamanship and navigation. At that bleak moment Monck felt the loss of his colleague acutely. As a soldier, used to the division of responsibilities in the management of an army, it had not struck him as odd that the naval fleet of the English Commonwealth should be held as a joint command. Being a man of good sense, Monck did not press any notions of greater experience or weight of seniority upon Deane, just as Deane forbore from any such reciprocal presumption against Monck. They had laboured well together in working the fleet up, as the day’s achievement told, when the effect of their new instructions to fight close and in line, so that their guns might play with the most devastating effect upon the enemy, had born some fruit. Typically, Monck saw the victory as Deane’s, not his. Monck turned away, letting the heavy drape fall back, to sway with the motion of the ship in sympathy with the oscillation of Deane’s cot. The past was done with; he must think of the coming hours.

  Ahead of the English fleet, beyond Lawson’s squadron and invisible to Monck unless he betook himself to the vantage point of the Resolution’s poop, the Dutch retreated, seeking the shelter of their shallow estuaries and the solace of a safe anchorage. No such consolation awaited the victors; to consolidate their hard-won triumph it was necessary for the English fleet to invest the enemy in his roads, mew him in by a close blockade if he could not first yet bring him to battle. That order had been Monck’s and his alone, though he saw nothing of genius in it, only the obvious imperative of military principle.

  He returned to the stern windows and sank down again upon the window seat. Fiddling in his pocket he found a comforting quid of tobacco and tucked it in his cheek. Beneath him he felt and heard the grind of the steering-chains as the tackles played with the great tiller two decks below him, setting the rudder-stock groaning in its housing. The wind remained light but the ship made sufficient way through the water to draw out from under her moving hull a swirling wake, marbled in green and white and quartered by seabirds, the names of which he was ignorant. For a few moments his tired brain, concussed by the seemingly endless din of the day’s gunnery, flitted like a frightened bird from one subject to another, unable to alight upon any sensible thought for more than a second or two before his fancy again took flight. He ruminated on the tobacco.

  Pressed now with the solitary responsibility for the conduct of the fleet, he was again confronted with his ignorance of
naval matters. His previous sea-service had been so long ago that he could not recall with clarity the difference between a bilboe and a euphroe, knowing only that one – the former he thought – was a form of restraint applied to the legs of a seaman charged with an offence; what the other was, he had not the slightest idea. Perhaps it did not matter to a General-at-Sea who had minions to attend to such niceties, but he was irked by the notion of being ignorant of the business with which he was charged. Minions or not, Monck was not used to delegating tasks he could not master himself. It went against the grain of all his military learning.

  ‘Never tell a solder to do what you cannot accomplish yourself,’ his old mentor Henry Hexham had insisted, and the same was true with seamen – perhaps even more so in the complicated business of manoeuvring a man-of-war. But it was not really considerations of others’ opinions that troubled Monck, not even his suspicions about Godbolt. The death of Richard Deane and the circumstances preceding it had revived old demons of his own, and they buzzed in his head that summer’s evening, along with the persistent tinnitus that now plagued his tired brain. It was not only an old man’s infirmities to which he must give himself over, but an old man’s thoughts.

  Once again, in spite of the fury of the day’s fighting, he had escaped death, but was this in order for fate to hold him her hostage for longer? Notwithstanding his premonitions, was Deane’s lamentable end a matter of pure misfortune, as much as his own survival was a matter of simple good luck? He did not think so. In that bleak moment Monck was apt to consider fate toyed with him, slaughtering Deane under his very nose as a warning, as if to say in tones of heavy irony: consider this, Honest George, this is what happens to a good man, a truly honest man, not a man who is responsible for the death of Nicholas Battyn, or a man who lay with another man’s wife, or one who lied for Cromwell, yes Cromwell, that paragon who, when thou and the man whose ensanguined corpse lies within yards of you were fitting out your present fleet, took power into his own hands and, with the Army, brought to an end the deliberations of an increasingly ineffectual and sectarian Parliament. God knows what else he might yet do…

  The thought made him shudder as, like a man awaking from a nightmare, Monck pulled himself together. Deane was – had been – a fine man and his loss robbed the English victory over the Dutch off the Gabbard Shoal of much of its savour. But Deane was just one of many dead men, dead men on both sides of a consequential action, and George Monck was no stranger to death. Had Deane lived and Monck died, he should not now be moping about the great cabin of the Resolution, but drafting his Report of Proceedings for submission to the Army Council, a duty which Monck must of necessity now do alone.

  He thought briefly of dictating it and then dismissed the notion. Their clerk had been slightly wounded; he need not be summoned now any more than Monck’s body-servant. Monck was quite as capable of writing a Report of Proceedings as putting himself to bed. For a moment he recollected the pleasant hours he had spent in The Tower with Anne, going over his writings on military operations. He then cast the thought aside. Pleasant? In The Tower? And yet it had been pleasant enough, a consolation at a time when Honest George required consolation. And now he had a victory to his hand, and what’s more, a victory over Maarten Harpertszoon Van Tromp, along with Michiel De Ruyter and Witte de With. Surely that was something to write home about?

  ‘For God’s sake…’ he growled to himself, casting consideration aside and bellowing for his servant, for there was duty to attend to. When the man presented himself, Monck called for wine, adding as he realised how hungry he was, ‘and something to eat.’ The servant began to suggest a cold tongue, but Monck waved his suggestion aside. ‘Bread and cheese, but wine chiefly.’ About to withdraw, Monck called him back. ‘And have the seamen restore my writing desk and a chair. Do that first… Oh, and pass word for Captain Bourne…and bring two glasses.’

  While he waited for some at least of his furniture to be restored to the cabin from which it had been removed when the Resolution was cleared for action that morning, Monck fully recovered his wits. Used to the concussion of field-guns in a land battle, he had had no idea of the effect of the concentrated fire of hundreds of heavy cannon within earshot in a major naval engagement. Almost incredulously he realised that those opening broadsides of sixteen Dutch men-of-war had not merely rendered him deaf, but had rocked his brain in his skull, a fact that would have interested Doctor Macrae. ‘It’s damnably obvious,’ he muttered in self-castigation, thinking of the smallness of the guns at Dunbar and their paucity in numbers when compared with the brute objects mounted on but one gun deck of a ship the size of the Resolution. In the Channel action the discharge of broadsides had been as nothing in comparison with the thunder of Resolution’s six batteries, two on each of her three decks, that had testified to today’s work. And while Dunbar, Breda and Nantwich, let alone the callous slaughter he had been part of in Ireland, had all seen their share of blood-letting and horror, nothing matched the artillery duel so lately fought that June day between two hundred men-of-war manoeuvring in light winds off the Gabbard Shoal.

  The comparison with Dunbar and the shadow cast by Godbolt made him think again of Lambert; how would cocky Lambert have stood this day’s work? How would Oliver himself? Neither, he thought, could have the slightest inkling of the fury of a naval battle. His train of thought was broken by a knocking at the door in the restored bulkhead that had been dropped at the end of the action to give Deane’s body a temporary resting-place. Clumping through in his boots, his hat in his hand and his long dark hair held back by a black ribbon, John Bourne footed a bow and saluted his commander-in-chief with a flourish of his hand-held hat. Monck noted that he could just hear the susurration as its plume of ostrich feathers swept the bare wooden deck; perhaps his hearing was coming back, along with a lift in his spirits.

  The left sleeve of Bourne’s buff coat was torn and a blood-soiled bandage bound the laceration. Monck noticed also that his cuirass was dented in two places where it had turned aside small-arms’ shot. He waved Bourne to the settee across the stern.

  ‘It lacks cushions, Captain Bourne, but I would not have you stand after such a day’s labour.’

  ‘Thank you, Excellency. It was indeed warm-work, but the ship is in as good a shape as we have a reason to expect.’

  ‘I see you have been wounded…’

  Bourne looked down at his bound arm and smiled, so that Monck noticed the contrast of his teeth with the grime of powder-smoke smeared across his face. ‘A graze, sir, nothing more. And you, sir, have you taken any harm?’

  ‘No, nothing beyond a hive of bees buzzing in mine ears.’

  ‘I should have warned you to wear a cloth about your head, but your previous service…’

  Monck held up his hand with a rueful smile. ‘Do not remind me of my previous service, or my lack of it, John,’ Monck added warmly. ‘I am only too aware of it and poor General Deane stood in the way of the shot which should have taken me out of this world and left you and the fleet with someone better able to command it. Ah,’ Monck looked up as his servant brought in a tray, two glasses and a bottle. ‘Here at last is something to mend ourselves.’

  As Monck raised his glass to his flag-captain in a silent toast, Bourne said, ‘If I might make so bold, Excellency, I should not trouble yourself over such matters. Our day was well fought and your order to, er,…to chase…’ Bourne’s expression was wry, his eyes falling from Monck’s gaze.

  ‘I think I said “charge,” Captain, again,’ Monck interrupted with a tired flash of humour, referring to his failure to embrace the orthodox naval jargon.

  Bourne smiled and made a gesture of indifference. ‘The meaning was unambiguous, Excellency, and the investment of the Dutch coast will consolidate our position.’

  ‘If the Dutch do not split their forces with some of their ships hiding in the back of Walcheren and the rest concealing themselves behind the dunes of Texel.’

  ‘That is a possibility…’r />
  ‘A strong possibility,’ said Monck, who could read a chart as well as any sea-officer and had seen service in his youth in the Low Countries. A lieutenant and three seamen entered the cabin, the sailors bringing Monck’s campaign desk and a chair. Once they had set them down, Bourne dismissed them with a peremptory wave as Monck continued: ‘We may expect Blake to arrive to our assistance before too many hours have passed, which will relieve us somewhat and impress upon our foes the puissance of our power, and we may yet catch them before they find safe anchorage.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ responded Bourne.

  ‘Now,’ Monck said, changing the subject and gesturing towards the hanging curtain, ‘the matter of General Deane, I would not have unnecessary word spread of his death. Is it widespread about the ship?’

  ‘Well, yes, Excellency. It was not widely so until after the men were stood down from their stations, but then it spread quickly.’

  ‘But it has not reached the fleet in general?’

  Bourne shook his head. ‘I do not believe so.’

  ‘Then let us keep it thus, at least until tomorrow. We shall be better fitted to face reality after a night’s rest.’

  ‘’Twill be well-earned.’ Seeing Monck’s man-servant enter the cabin bearing a tray, Bourne jumped to his feet. ‘Ah, your supper, Excellency, I shall be about my business.’

  ‘Until the morrow, Captain Bourne.’

  ‘Until the morrow, General Monck.’

  *

  As the early summer dawn threw a thin daylight into the Resolution’s great cabin, Monck rolled himself out of his cot. At least a ship’s cot gave a better night’s rest than a wet bivouac in the field, he thought, as he stood and stretched, relieving himself at stool in the larboard quarter-gallery before picking up a linen cloth and vigorously rubbing himself down. He felt steadier on his legs and the ringing in his ears, though still present, was much diminished.