The Battle of All the Ages

‘A four days’ fight, young Ned,’ I said. ‘Well over one-hundred and fifty ships.
Four days
, I tell you. The world had never seen its like before, and perhaps it never will again.’

The keen-eyed, long-nosed young man sitting before me nodded gravely and murmured a response. I did not catch all of what he said; my hearing is as keen as it was those sixty and more years ago, when my ears were subjected to that thunderous bombardment of so many hours’ duration, but these days I find that men speak so much more softly than once they did.

Unwilling to ask my youthful Cornish guest to repeat himself, I embarked upon the speech I had addressed to a hundred and more young officers like him over the years.

‘I knew them all, of course. All of those who commanded under our flag, back then in the early years of good King Charles’s reign: Prince Rupert, aye, and the Duke of Albemarle, too, General Monck that was, the very man who brought the king and monarchy itself back to these isles. And the rest of them, England’s famous paladins of the sea. Myngs, Holmes, Spragge – legends all. My dear friend Will Berkeley. Let me tell you, young Ned, there was never a surer friend to a man than poor Will, nor one whose reputation was more unjustly maligned –’

I noticed that the lad seated opposite me in my oak-panelled, tome-strewn library was saying something. I was about to damn his impertinence for interrupting me, but the faculties sometimes play tricks on one: he had not raised his voice, but suddenly I was hearing his words as clearly as if my dear Cornelia were whispering in my ear upon the pillow once again.

‘- But, sir, what was it truly that brought about the division of our fleet, and brought us to such a terrible condition that the Dutch could outnumber us so dreadfully?’

He was sharp indeed, this lad who was some sort of connection of the grandson of one of my old Cornish following during those halcyon days after the restoration of King Charles the Second, an age now as remote to most young blades of Ned’s age as that of Noah seems to me. He had passed the examination for lieutenant a year or two before, but like so many of his vintage he still had no commission: and that was the simple truth which had brought him to my door, in the almost certainly vain hope that an ancient man’s intercession might lead to his promotion.

‘Ah, the mystery of why our fleet was divided in the year 1666,’ I said, very slowly, as though I was hearing of the calamity for the first time. ‘Why Rupert and his ships were sent west to meet a threat that proved an illusion, leaving the rest of us to be pounded very nearly to Hell by the great De Ruyter and all his proud Dutchmen.’ I
studied
the young man’s clean, eager face. Like every single one of his generation, he had never experienced a fleet battle; had never even experienced the smallest fight at sea. Could he really conceive of the noise, and the smell, and the slaughter, that I lived through during those four days so very long ago? ‘All those good men dead, and for a falsehood –’

My words drifted away, for my mind was no longer in the library with the young man. It was flown far away, to the distant but still well-remembered land that was the first day of June, 1666, amid the
chain-shot, the blood and the death. I fancied I held a sword in my hand again as my command exchanged broadsides with Dutchman after Dutchman…

My guest was mouthing something – asking if I was well, or some such youthful nonsense, not realising that no man who has lived almost four score years and ten is truly well. But his concerned
mumbling
recalled me unwillingly to time and place.

‘The cause of the division of the fleet. Well now, Ned, that’s a
question
indeed. Was it heinous conspiracy and treachery or pure accident? I pondered it at the time, of course, as did all of England. But it has not greatly occupied my thoughts since –’

Even as I uttered the words, I knew they were a lie, and prayed that my voice did not betray my duplicity. For the question of the true cause of the division of the fleet, and thus of the terrible battle that sprang from it, had occupied my thoughts very much. It
occupied
them in those fleeting moments during the four days of Hell we endured in the North Sea when we were not entirely concerned with destroying the Dutch, or preventing them destroying us:
Why? In the name of God, why has this disaster happened? Where are Prince Rupert’s ships? Why are all these good men dying?
It occupied them in the days immediately after the battle, when I did rather more than ponder the possibility that our fleet’s predicament might be
attributable
to conspiracy: unless fighting for one’s life against the dark power of implacable enemies may be termed ‘pondering’. It occupied them on many occasions thereafter, even after I learned the perverse and astonishing truths of the matter.

I looked across at my young guest, and considered telling him the truth; even the truth which I had dared not admit to myself for all these years. But would he believe it? And in any case, what good would it do him, so very long afterwards?

‘No, young Ned,’ I said, ‘It is a history as dead as Julius Caesar. We are fortunate enough to live in an age of prolonged peace, and if you
ever hoist your flag, I do not think the lessons of what we endured in the year Sixty-Six will be of much use to you.’ He said something, but I did not hear it. ‘For what it is worth, I will write on your behalf to the First Lord of the Admiralty, My Lord Torrington. But I fear my recommendation carries little weight these days, when the navy is full of the creatures of our Hanoverian dynasty’s royal mistresses and those of our esteemed Prime Minister.’ The lad looked at me dumbfounded, for in these lessened times, to criticise either our German monarch or his chosen instrument, Sir Robert Walpole, is akin to farting in the face of a nun. ‘No, Ned, I fear it is your abilities, and they alone, that will decide your fate. Your abilities and the goddess of fortune, of course. For all we know, at this very moment a commission made out to you might be sitting upon a desk in the Admiralty, consigning you to be lieutenant of some pestilential sloop in the Caribbee and thus perhaps to fester in an unmarked grave in the Barbadoes within six months.’ I essayed a smile, although God knows what the effect of it was upon a young beholder studying the creasing of cracked lips in my ancient, wrinkled face. ‘Or else, of course,’ I said, ‘you may prosper. Perhaps glory, promotion, even a peerage and a landed estate, await you in the years that I will never live to see. Perhaps one day, as it roams the Elysian Fields, my shade will be able to look down and raise an invisible glass of nectar to toast the inestimable victories of Admiral Lord Hawke.’

‘Eighty-one. Eighty-two. Eighty-three. Eighty-four. Eighty-five. Eighty-six.’ Lieutenant Christopher Farrell lowered his telescope and turned to look directly at me. ‘They outnumber us by thirty, Sir
Matthew
.’ The horizon to the east-south-east was filled with hulls and sails.

The metal-grey sea was rough, whipped up by a strong, warm, blustery
south-westerly breeze; Kit Farrell had seemed to take an eternity to count the number of ships opposing us, for the distant vessels kept vanishing behind the swell. Even so, I could still make out the colours flying from the enemy’s ensign staffs and topmasts. The Dutch colours.

‘For a fleet that’s supposed still to be in harbour, they seem quite remarkably seaborne,’ I said sarcastically. ‘God bless our spies in
Holland
, who are paid so well for their invaluable intelligence.’

‘Forgive the ignorance of a landsman, Sir Matthew,’ said the youth at my side, in a tone at once haughty and irreverent, ‘but if the enemy outnumbers our fleet so heavily, why are we advancing toward it? Why are we not withdrawing discreetly into the safety of the Thames? Why are we, if I may be so bold as to venture the word,
attacking
?’

‘Because, My Lord,’ I began, ‘His Grace –’

‘Because,’ interrupted Phineas Musk, the barrel-shaped, bald creature who served nominally as my clerk, ‘His Grace the Duke of Albemarle, that was General Monck, that was the man who restored the King, that is our beloved general-at-sea. His Grace thinks as highly of the Dutch as he does of a dog-turd on the sole of his shoe. If he was out alone in a row-boat against the fleet yonder, he’d still consider the odds to be in his favour. My Lord.’

I scowled at Musk; such sentiments ought not to be expressed loudly upon the quarterdeck, where various mates and topmen could hear them. But Musk, an ancient retainer of the Quinton family, had somehow acquired the sort of licence that kings once gave their court jesters. He spoke the brutal truths that most men preferred to
dissemble
, and seemed perfectly impervious to any reprimand. Besides, he was entirely correct. At the council-of-war two days previously, I myself had heard the obese old Duke of Albemarle’s contemptuous dismissal of our Dutch enemy, uttered in his broad Devon brogue: ‘A land of atheistical cheese-mongers wallowing in bog-mud, gentlemen. Cowards to a man. One good English broadside and they’ll run for home, shitting themselves in fright.’ The Duke’s confidence seemed
not to have been shaken a jot by the loss of nearly a third of his fleet, despatched west under his joint general-at-sea, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, to intercept the French fleet that was reported to be coming up the Channel to join its Dutch allies, or else perhaps to stop the French invading Ireland, or Wales, or the Isle of Wight. No man seemed entirely certain what the French were meant to be doing, which was ominous. The prince had been recalled, but God knew where he was, or how long it would take his ships to return.

‘Ah yes,’ said my young companion, ‘His Grace. Never was the ducal address of honour so inappropriate. Was there ever such an ungraceful Duke in England as poor, fat old Georgie Monck?’

I frowned. There were men within earshot, and it did not do for them to hear their betters denigrating those who were better still. But I could say nothing. The lad was an Earl, and I was merely the brother and heir to an Earl. He was also given a quite remarkable degree of licence by the King, and, it was said, an even more remarkable degree of it by virtually every woman in London, from bawds to baronesses. By many of the men, too, allegedly; and, as some would have it, even by some of the animals. It was no surprise that his eyes were already old and tired, with bags beneath them that bore witness to far too many debauches. His shirt was open to the waist: to emulate the
seamen
, he claimed, though few of them were so underdressed in such a strong breeze, and none wore shirts of the finest silk. I suspected that the young man’s display of his bare chest might have been prompted by other, and rather baser, considerations. For this was John Wilmot, the young Earl of Rochester, come to sea as a volunteer on my ship, so that he could demonstrate his bravery to – well, it was not entirely clear which of his recent
amours
of any gender or species he was meant to be demonstrating it to. His father and my brother, the enigmatic Earl of Ravensden, had been friends and allies in exile, forever
plotting
to overthrow Cromwell and restore King Charles to his throne, and this connection proved sufficient to place the poetically-inclined 
young Earl aboard my ship. In a moment of weakness, I even agreed that My Lord could bring with him his pet monkey, an astonishingly evil creature that now gazed at me malevolently from its favoured perch in the mizzen shrouds.

‘Your orders, Sir Matthew?’ said Lieutenant Farrell, although he knew full well what my orders were going to be. We seemed to have known each other for an eternity, although in truth it was less than five years since the life of Captain Matthew Quinton, heir to an earldom, had been saved by the stocky, illiterate young Wapping tar Kit Farrell. We made a bargain, that day when the
Happy Restoration
was wrecked off Kinsale: I taught Kit how to read and write, and in return, he taught me the way of the sea.

‘We will clear for action, Mister Farrell.’

All around us, trumpets were blowing and drums beating as our consorts in the White Squadron began to do the same, pulling down the partitions below decks to create unobstructed spaces for the guns. Our fleet was forming into line of battle, but with no regard for any formal order. We were in a desperate hurry to be at the Dutch, and ships fell in wherever they could. Those flying the ensign of the Red Squadron, which should have been in the centre, intermingled with we of the White, which should have formed the vanguard of the fleet.

Kit moved stiffly to the rail and barked the necessary orders. Only a few months earlier, during my previous commission, both he and Phineas Musk had taken bad wounds in a sea-fight with a great
Danish
man-of-war. By rights, both should have been ashore, regaining their strength; but only death itself would have prevented my two
mismatched
companions from standing alongside Captain Sir Matthew Quinton on the quarterdeck as we sailed into battle. Kit needed the pay, and the prospect of glory and promotion that battle presented; Musk seemed to regard himself as the unlikely guardian angel of the entire Quinton family. Even so, the two men, one old, the other young, were moving about the heeling deck rather more slowly and
delicately than usual. In truth, they resembled a pair of ducks,
waddling
inelegantly upon a steeply sloping river bank.

Our own trumpets sounded, and the drums beat out a steady rhythm. Officers’ whistles sounded their shrill commands. Canvas fights were slung across the decks: protective nets, these, to offer the men some rudimentary concealment against enemy fire. From below came the unmistakeable sound of partitions being taken down, sea chests being thrown into the hold, and gunports being opened. The ship was being made ready for her first battle.

The prospect had an enervating effect upon the crew. Even if many were privately terrified, fatalistic or prayerful, all joined lustily in song after song: the hoary old favourites of the English seaman since time immemorial. From laments for loves left ashore to obscene denunciations of the Dutch, the men went through them all, and with a substantial leavening of Cornishmen, this was a crew that could sing better than any in the fleet. I even found myself joining in.

‘They eat up our fish, without reason or laws, but now they are going to pay for the sauce!’

Lord Rochester clapped enthusiastically, leering as he did so at Denton, the young servant-lad who was attending me.

Suddenly, there came a shout from the ship’s waist: ‘God bless Sir Matthew and his mighty prick!’

That brought a cheer and some laughter. I saw the eyes of those on the quarterdeck fix upon me, waiting to see my reaction. Kit,
standing
closest to me, was particularly pensive, no doubt concerned at his proximity to an explosion from a captain outraged by such insolence. The sly, obnoxious Lancelot Parks, resplendent in his yellow uniform as Captain of the new-fangled Marine detachment that we carried, stared at me eagerly, awaiting my word to despatch one of his men to deal with the miscreant who had taken the name of the ship and its captain in vain. But Phineas Musk merely sniggered, while Lord Rochester grinned, he being especially partial to jests about cocks and
cunnies. My command, the
Royal Sceptre
, was new, one of the big Third Rates that had emerged from the royal dockyards within the last couple of summers. But the more irreverent members of my company – that is to say, very nearly all of them – had promptly rechristened her ‘the king’s prick’. Knowing our sovereign lord rather better than the lowest grommet or swabber, I wondered whether the very same mischievous thought had actually been in His Majesty’s mind when he christened her. It would not have surprised me, and that thought shaped my response to the insolent shout from forward.

I strode to the quarterdeck rail, gripping it tightly as the ship heeled hard to larboard in the strong wind.

‘Well, then, my brave lads!’ I shouted. ‘Let’s show the Dutch
butter-boxes
what a great English prick can do! Let’s thrust it and thrust it again until we’ve truly pricked the Hollanders’ pride!’

I offered up a silent prayer of thanks that my Dutch wife Cornelia was not within earshot. I would have suffered mightily for such a tirade against her country of birth; moreover, there was every likelihood that her twin brother Cornelis commanded one of the ships that we were fast closing. But my little speech served its purpose. My crew, many of whom were stout-hearted Cornishmen who had served with me since my second commission, cheered me lustily, waving their fists in the air. But as I smiled, laughed and waved with them, I could not but think upon the odds that we faced, and the two strange circumstances that had brought us to this pass. Why had we received no word of the Dutch being at sea? Above all, why had Prince Rupert and the rest of our fleet been detached, and where in the name of God were they?

But we were not the only fleet with questions to answer. As we began to fall down toward the Dutch, the enemy’s ships came into view ever more clearly. Until then, the strength of the breeze and the choppy waters had concealed a startling fact about our opponents: they were
at anchor. Many of them still had their sails furled. Even now, over four hours after the fleets had first sighted each other, only the
squadron
nearest to us appeared to be getting under way. The sight of their sails filling with the breeze had fooled both Kit Farrell and myself: the bulk of the fleet behind them was immobile. Moreover, many of their ships were far off to the north-east, and would only be able to come into action against us with great difficulty. If the Duke of Albemarle was being unwarrantably bold, then his adversary, the much-vaunted Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel De Ruyter, seemed to be almost
suicidally
complacent.

‘Well, Lieutenant,’ I said to Kit, ‘what do you make of it?’

My friend and I had our telescopes fixed upon the enemy. I could make out the distinctive ensigns of the five Dutch admiralties: there, the three-barred Prince banner of the Maas and Friesland; there, the nine-barred Triple Prince of Amsterdam and the North Quarter of Holland; there, the Vlissingen ewer jack of Zeeland, where I had lived in exile before the King’s restoration and had acquired a wife. And, just as plainly, I could make out the anchor cables that secured the mighty fleet of the United Provinces to the bottom of the North Sea.

‘They cannot have expected us to fight today,’ Kit said. ‘With the strength of the wind, and our weakness in numbers, it would be a reasonable conclusion to draw. De Ruyter will probably have expected us to retire into the Thames. That would have been the strategy of any prudent admiral.’

The
Royal Sceptre
heeled even further to larboard. The same was true of the rest of the fleet. We were a glorious sight, bearing down upon the enemy in what was still a rudimentary, incomplete line of battle. Sails filled, flapped and roared in the strong breeze. Spray broke over our bows and those of our fellows as we rode the heavy sea. Yet magnificent as the spectacle was, it betrayed our weakness. We were fewer in number, as Kit Farrell said, but that was not all.

‘Nor will De Ruyter expect us to engage when hamstrung,’ I said.

I went to the larboard rail and looked down. The sea was swelling and breaking above the lower deck gunports, which were closed against the treacherous waters. The same was true of every one of our consorts.

The eager Rochester joined me.

‘Hamstrung, Sir Matthew? How are we hamstrung?’

‘We will be engaging the Dutch to larboard, My Lord – that is, fighting them from this side of the ship. Yet the wind is making us heel – that is, pushing us over – so far in that direction that we cannot use our lower deck guns. Our demi-cannon – that is, our heaviest guns, firing thirty-two pounds balls – are on that deck. Whereas the same wind will lift all the Dutch batteries well clear of the water.’