For King or Commonwealth (25 page)

‘Pass word for the men to break their fasts by messes. We must keep sufficient men available to man one broadside and haul the yards, just in case. Get Clarkson up here.'

‘Here sir.'

‘Very well, Mr Clarkson. We'll run after these fellows for half an hour while the men break their fasts but I want you to lay me alongside the nearer shortly thereafter. Do you get some burgoo inside you then relieve me for a few minutes.'

Faulkner watched the master hurry below, his full-skirted coat whipped about his spindly legs with their wrinkled stockings, but for all his rickety appearance he was a sound and reliable officer. ‘Quartermaster!'

‘Sir?'

‘Have Dutch colours hoisted and stand by to strike them and haul up our own upon the word.'

‘Hoist Dutch colours and stand by. Aye, aye, sir.'

The following twenty minutes were an agony of expectant waiting. When Clarkson reappeared Faulkner dashed below to change his shirt for fear of a wound, and haul on half-armour over his doublet. With his sword on he returned to the deck to find the men, having been fed, were all gathered at their stations. Ahead, the Dutch men-of-war loomed against the growing light and he could see more stretched out to the south as Van Tromp's line drew in a defensive crescent about the convoy laying ahead of it to the eastwards. He could see the concentration of vague silhouettes as they crept up on the northern flank of the mass of enemy vessels.

He walked forward and toured the upper deck, nodding to the petty officers and speaking in a quietly confident voice as he passed along the lines of guns, each with their crouching crews and, in passing, also addressing the men at the braces.

‘One final effort, my lads, and let's seize a prize and turn this whole affair to the advantage of our country and those who love us.'

He was rather pleased with this last, a direct appeal to the men's avarice not being consonant with a sea officer in the service of the Commonwealth, but the allusion to subterfuge and a prize at the end of it nevertheless reminded them of his earlier successes. When he had toured the upper deck he went below and repeated the process on the lower gun deck and, among the denizens of the orlop where, amid his gleaming saws, catlings and scalpels, the surgeon waited with his loblollies. Faulkner was gratified by the nods and grins his words elicited from some of the men. A few stared at him with indifference, but many, he sensed, were invigorated by his taking the trouble to walk among them.

As he returned to his post on the quarterdeck it occurred to him that where his last sentence applied to himself, it rang hollow. The thought of Katherine caused a violent twist in his gut and set his jaw so that Clarkson, watching him approach, saw a look of such steely determination cross his captain's face that he never afterwards forgot it.

‘We're coming up on them, sir,' he almost whispered. ‘They'll be smelling a rat.'

Clarkson got no further for the wary Dutch were undeceived by the barely visible tricolour flying from the peak of the mizzen and two stern chasers barked from the transom of the nearer and larger of the Dutchmen. A second later he felt the
thud
thud
of the shots going home in the
Union
's solid timber sides and saw the pale ovals of faces looking aft, awaiting an order to respond.

There was nothing that could be done as yet, for only one bow chaser could be brought to bear. Faulkner ran forward to the knightheads and shouted a torrent of Dutch oaths that he had picked up in Helvoetsluys. A query was shouted back at him but he was already running aft, calling for the starboard batteries to make ready.

Back alongside Clarkson he heard the query repeated and turned to the master. ‘Ease her to larboard, Mr Clarkson, two points, I think. Quartermaster, strike those false colours and hoist our own.'

The Dutch bunting was already on deck and he spun round and called out, ‘Fire when you bear!'

There was what seemed like a long moment of silence. Then the Dutch vessel began to slew to larboard an instant before Stockton and Whadcoat unleashed the
Union
's gunfire. The action developed rapidly, the Dutchman clewing up his courses and accepting battle. She was a sixty- or seventy-gun ship, but, like most of her fellows, less heavily armed than the English whose greater weight of metal had been a surprise to their enemy in every action fought since hostilities had begun.

Smoke and thunder filled the air and dinned the senses as the two vessels closed. Fortunately for Faulkner, by engaging the larboard side of the enemy's northernmost ship it would prove some time before any of her consorts could come to her aid and, in the event, with a fair wind and the English astern, none turned back, so that the
Union
and her victim lay locked in combat as the Dutch moved steadily away and the English came up astern and passed them. Those English vessels passing close enough to the Dutchman's unengaged side poured in a broadside in passing, work that greatly aided the task of Faulkner and his men so that, within twenty minutes, the
Union
's gunfire had so battered the enemy's side that hardly a gun was firing in response.

Faulkner called for boarders and men ran to pick up cutlasses and boarding pikes. Stockton was up on the breech of an upper-deck gun, his sword drawn, his powder-blackened face adding a manic look to his eyes as he hollered for the men to follow him. A moment later the two hulls came together with a jarring crash and grappling irons whipped out on the ends of their lines from both ships and they were bound together in a mutual acceptance of what must now follow.

Faulkner watched as the first wave went over the gap between the upper gunwhales of the two vessels occasioned by the tumblehome of each. Men were now coming up from below with Whadcoat at their head. Most were former soldiers, men more familiar with hand-to-hand combat than working artillery and they went to their savage work with a grim and terrible purpose. Whooping uncharacteristically, Whadcoat led them over the gap and, turning to Clarkson, Faulkner said, ‘Watch her, Mr Clarkson, watch her!' And then he too followed, caught up in the madness of the moment.

He all but lost his life as well as his dignity in the scramble to get from the
Union
to the enemy's deck and only an open gun-port lid saved him from becoming stuck ignominiously between the two ships. But he quickly recovered, hauled himself upwards and was over the side, dropping down on to a scene from hell as he slithered in the gore running across the once-immaculate planking of the scrubbed deck.

There was barely any resistance amidships, though a violent contest was in train for possession of the Dutchman's afterdeck. The desperate defenders fought with demonic courage and were in the act of throwing the Englishmen back. Faulkner saw Stockton fall and the sight galvanized him. He ran forward, almost lost his footing in the blood and viscera, and threw himself into the fight. Slashing left and right, he bellowed for his men to move forward as he fought his way to stand over Stockton. Their captain's presence in their midst seemed to rally the boarders as the shouts of fury, pain and exertion filled the air, punctuated by the clash and scrape of steel on steel, the thump and bang of body or cuirass in collision, and the occasional pop of a wheellock pistol. Faulkner felled a large Dutchman to his knees, then ran him through. The man had already been wounded and he stepped clear of Stockton's body, thrust the tottering Dutchman aside and saw, towards the stern of the ship, a group of armoured and sashed gentlemen regroup, panting, several bearing wounds, and all streaming in sweat. They were obviously what remained of the enemy's officers.

‘Come on!' Faulkner shouted as on either side of him a group of his own men took post in a ragged line. There was a moment's hesitation.

‘
Meneer
!' Faulkner called out. ‘Capitulate . . .'

One of the Dutchmen, short of breath, shook his head. Beside him one of the men from the
Union
, who Faulkner afterwards learned had served as a dragoon, held a wheellock that he had quickly loaded. Raising it, he levelled it and fired. The spurt of the priming and snap of the discharge took Faulkner by surprise, but he was relieved when the panting Dutchman fell, a neat hole in his cuirass. Outnumbered, his officers dropped their swords and turned their hands up in gestures of abject helplessness. One of them turned to a cleat and began slipping the flag halliards. Then, as the huge Dutch ensign fluttered to the deck like a dying bird, Whadcoat appeared, saying that resistance below had crumpled. The ship was theirs.

‘She's the
Alkmaar
, sir,' someone said. ‘Her third lieutenant speaks a little English.'

‘Find out the number of men she carries and from what Admiralty she is. Mr Whadcoat, pick thirty men for your prize crew. Let me know when you have the enemy below hatches.'

It was victory, and a vindication of sorts, but Faulkner felt nothing, only the necessity to return to the
Union
, make sail and continue the pursuit.

‘It was a missed opportunity, whatever may be said about an English victory,' Faulkner said as he sat and regarded his patron. Mainwaring, sitting huddled by a fire of sea-coal despite both the cost of the fuel and the warmth of the early spring day, looked like a man close to death. His heavy features had collapsed, his jowls hung like those of an old bloodhound and his hair was lank, sparse and entirely missing from the crown of his head.

Only his eyes burned, eager for information about the encounters with the Dutch, and Faulkner, unable to find any consolation in the circumstances in which he found his old benefactor, took refuge in a diatribe against the mismanagement of recent events.

‘What,' asked Mainwaring, in a voice wheezy with infection, ‘happened to allow Van Tromp to escape?'

‘In a word – complacency. We had them to loo'ard, pinned hard against the French coast under the Grey Cape, the fleet and the convoy all together when the General threw out the signal to anchor. I suppose General Blake assumed we could finish the business in the morning. True, we were worn out with three days of posturing and fighting, besides being low on ammunition, but so were the Dutch and in no like case to ourselves, having lost about eight of their men-of-war and above two dozen of the convoy with the loss of only one of our own.'

‘And Tromp escaped?' Mainwaring asked, his bristling eyebrows raised in incredulity.

Faulkner nodded. ‘Alas, yes. He weighed and carried the tide round the headland, past Calais and into Gravelines, running through the banks he knew so well.'

‘Did we not know them equally?'

‘There were those amongst us who thought so but not until the Dutch had escaped and the deed had been done.'

They fell silent, each man enveloped in his own thoughts. Then Mainwaring said, ‘So they came up the Channel in the old way and you fought them in the old way but when Tromp anchored as Medina-Sidonia did, there was no Drake to send in fire ships.'

Faulkner shook his head but, detecting Mainwaring's generally censorious tone, he responded. ‘No, and no gale to blow them to the devil either, though they did form a crescent, just as the Spanish in eighty-eight. Had they not done so,' he added to remind Mainwaring of his own modest achievement in the general action, ‘I should not have had the opportunity to peck at its northernmost limb.'

Mainwaring smiled, a wry grin stretching his purple lips. ‘No, you did your best, Kit. I did not mean to impugn your spirit. A superior ship, you say?'

‘Aye, sixty guns. The
Alkmaar
.'

‘Well, I suppose that when you are a General-at-Sea, you will benefit from Blake's error.'

Faulkner smiled back. ‘I should not think that circumstance is very likely, Sir Henry.'

Faulkner spent a week in Camberwell, leaving Mainwaring with a sum of money to see him through until the warmer weather of summer eased his rheumatics and his rasping breathing. His own finances were increasingly straightened thanks to the war, and although his prospects of credit were enhanced by the capture of the
Alkmaar
, it would yet be months before this would be translated into ready money. Returning to London, Faulkner took lodgings in the City, finding a room in The Ship by St Olave's, Hart Street, whose bells he had – not so long ago – heard from his room in the Tower. He had hardly settled in his room when he received a summons to wait upon Monck, himself lodged in Westminster. With Blake wounded, Monck and his fellow General-at-Sea, Sir Richard Deane, were co-ordinating another rapid reconstruction of the battle-battered fleet in anticipation of renewed action with the energetic Dutch. Faulkner's
Union
was herself in Chatham, having her wounds dressed and her damages repaired under the supervision of Commissioner Pett who, if Faulkner had his way, would be hounded daily by Whadcoat.

If Blake was stern, bluff and bad tempered, George Monck was an even more stolid man. Of medium height, powerfully built with a stern expression and a penetrating eye that flashed with a quick intelligence gleaned in a hundred fights, on land as well as on sea, Monck was an imposing character. Faulkner had hardly presented himself before Monck came to the point.

‘General Deane and I,' he began, ‘have been considering the lessons learned in our late action and Sir Richard suggested that, knowing your experience and energy in these matters, you should be charged with drafting Fighting Instructions for the fleet. I can arrange for you to have the services of two clerks at the Navy Office and one week in which to present us with your conclusions.' He handed Faulkner a paper. ‘Here are some rough conclusions Sir Richard and I have come to regarding the deficiencies in the conduct of the fleet lately in action. These need addressing and rectifying. We thought it wise to request a commander to draft them in the first instance, on the basis of not asking for the impossible. Do you take my point, Captain Faulkner?'