by J. D. Davies
Here lyeth the body of Perfection's Glorie
Fame's owne worlde wonder, and the ocean's story.
The right protector, rightful scourge of wrong,
In peace a dove, in war a lyon strong,
Vertues embracer, Vices opposite,
Times chiefest ornament, true valour's Knight.
The all just Heaven, regarding high deserts,
Bereav'd the earth of his devine parts,
Leaving here nought of him but slimy dross
And a continual grief for such a loss.
Readers seeking more detail on the naval history of these years should delve into R B Wernham’s magisterial book, The Return of the Armadas, although the older account by Sir Julian Corbett, The Successors of Drake, still has much to commend it. I also used a number of original sources, especially The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, published by the Navy Records Society. Regrettably, the Irish campaigns are comparatively little known beyond the borders of the Republic; however, there is a splendid and very well illustrated collection of essays, The Battle of Kinsale, edited by Hiram Morgan, although this is quite difficult to get hold of, and a more accessible recent study by Des Ekin, The Last Armada. For the history of General Federico Spinola and his galleys, see the article by Randal Gray in The Mariner’s Mirror, 1978. The clan battle described in Chapter 22 takes place between fictitious septs of two very real clans, but is based quite closely on the Battle of Glen Fruin, fought between the MacGregors and Colquhouns in February 1603 on ground that is now very nearly a stone’s throw from the nuclear submarine base at Faslane; here, I drew my inspiration from Nigel Tranter’s novel Children of the Mist, rather than from any strictly historical work. It is slightly invidious to single out titles from the long list of other books that I consulted prior to, and during, the writing of The Rage of Fortune, but special mention should go to Ian Mortimer’s marvellous The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England. Nicholas Iles’ ‘poetry’ about the Earl of Ravensden is taken, with appropriate modification where necessary, from The Legend of Captain Jones (1631) by David Lloyd, future Dean of Saint Asaph – probably the first work of naval historical fiction to be written by a Welshman!
I have taken a liberty with the record by placing the first meeting of the Earl with his future wife at the chateau of Chambord. This was effectively abandoned by the French royal family for a hundred years after the death of François I in 1547, but for simple narrative logic, I needed the meeting to take place relatively close to Nantes – and my fond memories of Chambord won out over strict historical accuracy. Laszlo Horvath (or, as he would be in strictly correct Magyar, Horvath Laszlo) is a fictional character, but the political and religious make-up of Hungary and Transylvania during this period were as I have described them, and the battles and wars in which I have placed him were real enough; the so-called ‘Long War’ between the Ottoman Empire and a Christian alliance comprising the Holy Roman Empire, Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania lasted from 1591 to 1606. There was a real ship called the Merhonour during this period, but readers of the series will recall that the fictional version which I have deployed here ‘survived’ until the 1660s, when she becomes the command of Earl Matthew’s grandson, the eleven year old boy who narrates the story. The young Matthew Quinton is the protagonist of the other books in this series, which are set against the backdrops of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Anglo-Dutch wars of that period.
The ‘Gowrie House affair’ remains one of the abiding mysteries of British history. One of the few certainties is that, on 5 August 1600, James the Sixth, King of Scots, and a party of courtiers went to Gowrie House in Perth at the behest of Alexander, Master of Ruthven, the younger brother of John, third Earl of Gowrie. By mid-afternoon, both Alexander and John were dead, and the King and his apologists insisted that they had made a clumsy attempt upon his life. All sorts of alternative theories circulated during the months and years that followed, but one of the most persistent centred on the notion that a mysterious English ship had been present in the Firth of Tay at the relevant time, perhaps intended to whisk King James to captivity in England. Robert Logan of Restalrig, the shady adventurer who had mysterious dealings with the Earl of Gowrie, was indeed the co-owner of a large private warship on the east coast of England, although in reality, his partner was Lord Willoughby d’Eresby, one of the great soldiers of Elizabethan England (and another of the models for the Earl of Ravensden in this book; for instance, Willoughby went to study at Padua in 1596 in order to recover from his wounds, and undoubtedly met the Earl of Gowrie there, thus providing that element of Matthew Quinton senior’s ‘back story’). Fast Castle is a real place, and its scanty remains, still perched crazily on the outcrop described in this book, are well worth a distinctly strenuous walk. The castle, which was Logan of Restalrig’s property during this period, has always inspired myths and legends, with Sir Walter Scott rechristening it ‘Wolf’s Crag’. In 1594, Logan entered into a contract with John Napier of Merchiston, later the inventor of logarithms, who was to employ magic to unearth an unnamed and mysterious treasure hidden somewhere in the sea-caves under Fast. Nothing came of Napier’s treasure hunt, apart from a falling out between the two contractors; in what appears to have been a mild over-reaction, Napier subsequently forbade the letting of any of his property to anyone named Logan. I owe the notion that the ‘Casket Letters’ might have been the treasure hidden at Fast Castle to Fred Douglas and his book Gold at Wolf’s Crag? An Historical Investigation (1971), although Douglas overcooked his thesis somewhat by suggesting that another plausible ‘candidate’ for the lost treasure of Fast might be none other than the Holy Grail itself. I hope that devotees of Douglas, and the rather more numerous devotees of Dan Brown, will forgive my tongue-in-cheek reference to this theory during the scene in the Fast Castle sea-cave.
The subsequent accession of James the Sixth to the English throne has led many to assume that this was somehow ‘inevitable’. Nothing was further from the truth, and I have depicted the furious debates over the succession, the identities of the possible candidates, and the attitudes of leading players like Cecil and Essex, as accurately as I could in a work of fiction. Similarly, the popular perception of James Stuart as a coward and a peacemaker has blinded many people to the undoubted historical fact that, prior to 1603, he appeared to many in England as a belligerent and somewhat unstable warmonger who had personally led armies into battle on several occasions, and who directly threatened to invade England on several others. Thus the possibility of King James invading to assert his rights to the succession seemed very real during this period, and indeed, in 1600 James asked his Parliament for money to fund an army precisely for that purpose. John, Earl of Gowrie, was one of the most prominent critics of this warmongering brinkmanship on the part of the so-called rex pacificus.
The question of the degree of foreknowledge of Gowrie’s plot, if any, on the part of Robert Cecil, remains an open question, although it is at least worth noting in passing that within a few years, Cecil really was in a relationship with Barbara Ruthven, one of the many sisters of the dead earl and his brother, a relationship alluded to during the moorland meeting of King James and the Earl of Ravensden; and it was Barbara I had in mind as the (unnamed) individual who could have authenticated the Casket Letters for Cecil. Similarly, my account of the ‘neutrality’ of Broughty Castle during the fight between the Constant Esperance and van der Waecken’s Dunkirker is based on the unsubstantiated suggestion that Sir James Scrymgeour, the Provost and Constable of Dundee, was secretly in league with the Earl of Gowrie. (Incidentally, van der Waecken was a real character, although I invented this particular cruise of his.) I explore all of these matters in detail in my book Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ (Ian Allan, 2010), which presents all of the bewildering theories surrounding the ‘Gowrie House’ affair, provides a tentative explanation of what might really have happened, and stresses an inconvenient but unarguable
truth: that King James was in far more real and immediate danger of his life at Perth on 5 August 1600 than he was at Westminster on 5 November 1605.
The paternity of King James the Sixth and First, and the fate and contents of the missing ‘Casket Letters’, have been debated since the sixteenth century. As I wrote in Blood of Kings,
Whispered doubts about the legitimacy of James Stuart were doing the rounds within hours of the child’s birth at Edinburgh Castle, if not before…Mary [Queen of Scots] was clearly all too aware of such rumours, and their potentially damaging political consequences. Hence the embarrassing farce on the day of James’s birth, 19 June 1566, when Mary’s despised and drunken husband was virtually dragged to her bedchamber and made to declare that he was undoubtedly the father of the infant prince… None of it did the queen much good, and when she subsequently blasted what little was left of her reputation by appearing to connive in the murder of her husband, Darnley, and then in short order marrying his suspected murderer, Bothwell, all the whispered suspicions could finally be shouted out loud. Edinburgh graffiti portrayed the queen as a mermaid, a common euphemism for a whore, and a barb from Ovid mysteriously appeared on her wedding night, fastened to the gate of Holyrood Palace:
As the common people say,
Only harlots marry in May…
Like the birth of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart in the summer of 1688, it was politically imperative that the child born to Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1566 should be a healthy son. In the fraught political and religious situation of the day, any alternative – a still birth or a girl – would have been an unmitigated disaster. The legality of female succession was still not entirely clear-cut; as John Knox’s tirade against the ‘monstrous regiment of women’ had demonstrated, many Scots remained deeply uncomfortable about the notion of a female monarch, and certainly had no desire to repeat the experiment. In 1566, anything other than a healthy son would at the very least have triggered speculation about a new husband for the queen, given the obvious precariousness of her marriage to the alcoholic Darnley. At worst, the resultant succession crisis could have triggered a bloody civil war – and although such a war eventually broke out, it only followed Mary’s abdication, and a highly unlikely chain of events that no one could possibly have foreseen in the spring and summer of 1566. Therefore…there is a powerful inner logic underpinning the theory of a conspiracy by Mary and certain of her key advisors to pass off a son who might not have been Darnley’s as the legitimate son of the King and Queen of Scots…
These dark rumours about King James’s true paternity persisted for years. If anything they acquired ever more currency, for as James got older, it became increasingly apparent that he bore little resemblance in personality or physique to either of his supposed parents, Darnley and Queen Mary…If the illegitimacy of King James VI and I really was secret knowledge possessed by the Ruthvens, it might be connected somehow to the undoubted fact that the first Earl of Gowrie [father of the third Earl, killed at Perth on 5 August 1600] was the last certain owner of the Casket Letters, which were passed to him by the Regent Morton’s illegitimate son in 1581 or 1582. These were the mysterious, lost documents that implicated Mary, Queen of Scots, in the murder of her husband Henry, Lord Darnley, King James’s legal father. Copies were produced at Mary’s first trial in England, shortly after she sought sanctuary there, and their incriminating nature provided some of the justification for shutting her away in a succession of gloomy English castles for twenty years. But copies…do not necessarily give the whole story, certainly not the true story, and the extant copies of the Casket Letters do not prove that King James was illegitimate. Argument rages to this day over whether or not the surviving letters are genuine, or clever forgeries produced by Moray’s government and based on the manipulation of real letters written by Mary. As far as the paternity of King James is concerned, though, this point is academic. The ‘casket’ originally contained rather more documents than were presented in public – ten more, to be precise. Although the contents of a couple of the missing documents can be surmised, the rest are lost. There might have been documents that proved or hinted at James’s illegitimacy, but if such had existed, the [regimes that ruled Scotland after 1567] would have had good reason to conceal or destroy them. They wanted documents that proved Mary’s foreknowledge of the death of Darnley, and might have been perfectly prepared to manufacture them if they could not find suitable proof in her own hand. But they owed their authority and all they possessed to the simple fact that they served James VI, undoubted King of Scots by hereditary right, and any evidence to suggest that the infant to whom they bowed the knee was actually not undoubted king by heredity would at once have threatened their power, if not their very lives.
Regardless of whether or not any evidence of his illegitimacy in the Casket Letters had been destroyed before they came into the first Earl of Gowrie’s possession, King James – who presumably only knew the contents of the copies – could not have known this for certain…It is certainly the case that Gowrie refused to sell the Casket Letters to Queen Elizabeth, who was desperate to get hold of them. He might have taken the documents with him when he tried to flee the country by ship from Dundee in 1584: legend has it that when an old house in the town was pulled down, a bundle of old letters in French was found hidden in a chimney.
The Casket Letters are highly unlikely to have been the ‘treasure’ that drew King James to Gowrie House on 5 August 1600: he would hardly have gone hunting in Falkland Park for four hours if he had even the slightest inkling that the most important documents his mother ever wrote, or else the proofs that he was not the rightful legitimate King of Scots, were within his grasp. But it is just conceivable that at Gowrie House, the Ruthvens sought to blackmail him into agreeing to their demands by threatening to produce the originals of the Casket Letters; an urn containing ashes, found within a hidden closet of the house when it was demolished in 1807, was inevitably identified as the final repository of the lost documents. Alternatively, the letters could have been produced after James’s abduction, or abdication, or murder, to justify the Ruthven coup.
Ultimately, of course, if James Stuart really was the son of David Rizzio, then every monarch of Great Britain since 1603, and subsequently of the United Kingdom – including the present incumbent – has had no right whatsoever to sit upon the throne, as Matthew Quinton suggests in the final chapter.
But that would be another story altogether.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ever since I conceived the original idea for the journals of the (younger) Matthew Quinton, I hoped one day to have an opportunity to write a prequel about his namesake, the eighth Earl of Ravensden; and, of course, giving them the same name means that the series title, ‘the Journals of Matthew Quinton’, can apply to stories about both men. Readers of the previous books in the series will know just how pervasive the influence of his grandfather is for the younger Matthew during his adventures at sea after the Restoration, even to the extent of hearing the occasional (imagined?) ghostly aside from the old sea-dog. I also wanted to correct the still deeply entrenched notion that Elizabeth the First’s great war with Spain was all about the Spanish Armada, and that not very much happened after that. In fact, the Armada campaign was near the beginning of the war, not the end, and sixteen years of largely indecisive but often fascinating warfare still lay ahead. So when it was suggested that it would be better for the next two stories about the younger Matthew Quinton during the Anglo-Dutch wars, namely Death’s Bright Angel, which culminates in the Great Fire of London of 1666, and The Devil Upon the Wave, which deals with the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667, to be published to coincide with the 350th anniversaries of those events, I jumped at the opportunity to be able to write this story in the meantime – especially as it took me back to the period at the very end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth that I had both taught for many years and researched in great detail for my non-fiction book Blood of Kings, many element
s of which provided inspiration, and a substantial amount of detail, for some of the key themes in this story. In the event, unforeseen circumstances greatly delayed the appearance of this book, but I am grateful to my agent, Peter Buckman, and to Jack Butler and Richard Foreman of Endeavour Press, for eventually bringing it into the light of day.
Thanks also to Elizabeth Carr; David Hope; Andrew, Lord Hothfield; and above all, as always, to Wendy, for making another Quinton Journal immeasurably better than it might otherwise have been.
J D Davies
