The Battle of All the Ages (3 page)

In truth, it had not been quite so simple; but I doubted whether the noble Lord could cope with such niceties as the myriad factors that could affect a fleet’s rate of fire. As it was, he seemed satisfied with my explanation. But as we watched Tromp’s ships fall into line ahead, one after the other, it was clear that a new game was afoot. An unknown game, where both fleets fought in line, not just one. A game in which the Duke of Albemarle’s confidence might prove misplaced.

Both fleets were now moving south-east, away from the coast of England and toward that of Flanders, but on converging courses. Very soon, we would be within range. I called my officers together, received their reports, and despatched them to their stations with words of encouragement. On the whole, they were a good body of men: a new ship like the
Royal Sceptre
was a plum post, and there was always
ferocious
competition for such offices. Hardy, the master, was a younger brother of Trinity House, a veteran seaman who had commanded merchantmen in the Levant and Virginia trades. Richardson, the carpenter, had been a shipwright in the royal dockyard at Portsmouth. He knew his business, but was a silent, sullen man who grew animated only when attempting to explain his unfathomable conviction that he knew how to build a four-decked ship. Burdett, the gunner, was an old Parliament-man who had served in the New Model Army’s siege train; although this made him anathema to some of the Cornish, who were Cavaliers to a man, he clearly knew his business and seemed a quiet, discreet man. Urquhart, the boatswain, was a Scotsman bred up in the king’s navy, learning the ropes in the great Ship Money fleets. He seemed able enough, although I regretted that his appointment meant I was unable to secure the office for Martin Lanherne, the
valiant
Cornishman who had been with me since my second command. Rather than serve under another, Lanherne had returned to his native county to serve in the press gangs; I pitied any unsuspecting young Cornishman who encountered him on a quiet country lane.

As on any ship, the complement of warrant officers was completed by a purser (Stride, a fawning Irishman appointed through the
influence
of the Duke of Ormonde), a surgeon (Rowan, an elderly man who seemed positively to relish the feel and sound of a blade sawing through bone), a cook (Prentice, who had lost a leg in the Gabbard fight), and a chaplain. The latter was a strongly built, dark haired man of middle years clad in a simple cassock. He emerged from below, looked about the deck and over towards the Dutch fleet, then picked
up a musket from a stand upon the deck and aimed it toward the fastapproaching Tromp.

‘So is it a good day for killing Dutchmen, Sir Matthew?’ he asked in his familiar Shropshire accent.

‘If God wills it, Francis. As I expect you will tell us shortly.’ The Reverend Francis Gale smiled, strode up to the quarterdeck, called the men in the waist to gather before him, and launched into the prayer before battle prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer.

Francis Gale was now the respected vicar of Ravensden, but when I first encountered him, he was the sottish chaplain of my second
command
, the frigate
Jupiter
, tormented by the brutal killing of the love of his life during Cromwell’s attack on Drogheda. Francis attained peace of mind in those same bloody hours of battle when I discovered my vocation as a seaman. We became fast friends, and, at my behest, my brother, the Earl, subsequently presented him to the living. But Francis Gale was not a man to be long content with the comforts of a country parish. He served with me in two of my subsequent
commands
, proving equally adept at exorcising evil spirits and wielding a cutlass against the enemies of Old England. I was somewhat surprised that the Earl and the Dowager Countess had consented to yet another leave of absence to enable Francis to serve with me at sea, but Charles explained all before I left London to join my command.

‘I am content,’ said the Earl of Ravensden, ‘and more
importantly
, so is our mother. She has been in transports of delight since that troublesome tinker Bunyan was thrown back into Bedford gaol,
and commends Francis for his part in the arrest. The dissenters of the Hundred are much discouraged, and skulk behind their hedgerows. So I think that in this present moment, mother would grant the
Reverend
Gale anything he asked, even her hand in marriage.’

I laughed, for Francis’s flattery of the venerable Dowager Countess of Ravensden was entirely shameless. In turn, she, for whom the word virago might have been coined, was known to blush and simper in his presence like the most innocent of virgins.

‘The bloody flag!’

The cry came from the lookout at the maintop. I ran to the stern rail, snatched my telescope from Kellett, and focused on the vast, unmistakeable shape of the flagship
Royal Charles
, some ten or twelve places behind us in the line, spray cascading over her huge bows as she breasted the waves. There, at her foretop, flew an enormous plain red flag.

The bloody flag.

The signal for every ship to fall upon the enemy and fight to the death.

‘Ready, Mister Burdett!’ I raised my sword. ‘On my command – wait – wait –’ I brought the sword down. ‘
As each gun bears, give fire!
’

The larboard broadside of the
Royal Sceptre
fired in anger for the first time. The deck shuddered as the culverins down on the upper deck fired and recoiled. Likewise, the short demi-culverin cuts on the quarterdeck belched flame and recoiled across the deck until held by the tackle. I felt the familiar kick in the chest and stomach, heard the roar that sometimes deafened those unaccustomed to it. The crews
immediately set to, scouring and cooling the gun barrels before
ramming
home the ladles bearing the powder charges, then the wadding, then the great round balls themselves. Although the wind blew most of the smoke away, enough of it swirled back over the deck to fill my nostrils with the now-familiar acrid stench. I stole a glance at the Earl of Rochester, for I knew this was his first experience of war. His open mouth and streaming eyes made it plain that his battle virginity had been well and truly deflowered. As if to echo the emotions of its master, his monkey let out an unearthly shriek and disappeared below decks.

I squinted through the smoke, trying to make out the extent of the damage, if any, to our opposite number, a fifty-gunner of the Amsterdam admiralty. Burdett came onto the quarterdeck to report, but before he could speak, the flames of our opponent’s broadside spat defiance from her gunports. I heard the whoosh and whistle of
chain-and
bar-shot, but it was well above me. I looked up and saw three or four holes in the main course, one or two in the fore.

Burdett saluted. ‘Reckon we put half a dozen balls into her hull, Sir Matthew. But most fell well short. Difficult to get the aim right in this heavy a sea. Same for them, of course, which is why they’ve fired so high.’

‘Very well, Mister Burdett. Do your best, once we have reloaded.’

‘If only we could use the demi-cannon on the lower deck, Sir
Matthew
. Then, it would be a different matter.’

Francis Gale, standing nearby and cradling a musket
incongruously
against his cassock, nodded. ‘I shall pray for a calm sea, Master Gunner.’

‘Amen to that, Reverend.’

With that, Burdett returned to oversee the reloading of the guns on the upper deck.

‘Why is it that we fire low and the Dutch fire high, Sir Matthew?’ Rochester asked.

‘It is not a universal rule that they do this and we do that, My Lord,’ I said, ‘but in general, our ships have more guns than theirs: Dutch ships must be smaller than ours to navigate the shoals off their coast, and their harbours are shallow. And theirs are often lighter built than ours, with less heavy scantlings.’ I saw the mist cloud his eyes once again. ‘The dimensions of the frames and the beams,’ I said. Still the mist swirled. ‘The thickness of the wood.’ At last, some sort of understanding seemed to dawn. ‘So usually, but not always, we fire into their hulls from a distance, hoping to kill their guncrews and break their spirit –’

As if to illustrate my point, our second broadside fired, Burdett now having my authority to fire at his own discretion. A shot struck the Amsterdammer in the very middle of the hull, next to one of the gunports. A jagged gap appeared, as if the wood was merely paper that had been punched through, and even across several hundred yards of open water, the screams of men on the gun deck were clearly audible. The Amsterdammer fired off her response almost at once. Rochester ducked, but for a second time, almost all of her shot passed well above our heads.

‘We fire into the hulls from a distance, hoping to cripple the ship that way,’ I said. ‘They fire for our masts and rigging, hoping to disable us, allowing them to close and board. But with the sea as it is, My Lord, it is devilishly difficult for either of us to make our shot strike where we wish it to. The only blessing is that we have the wind, which means we determine the range – the only way the Dutchman, yonder, can carry out his preferred tactic of boarding us is to come up into the wind, and that we will not let him do.’

Rochester’s expression was troubled, and I realised that I would have to explain to him what having the wind meant, and what the weather gage was. Yet again. Having already explained it to him at least five times, both before and after the fleet’s sailing from the Thames.
Fortunately
he seemed to realise that this was a question it was probably better
not to ask, and with some thankfulness I moved away to the starboard rail, to see how the rest of the battle fared.

At first sight, all seemed well; indeed, better than well, given the odds we faced, and that remained the case for much of the afternoon. The two fleets were sailing south-east, parallel to each other, each fleet in its line of battle. We were sailing close-hauled with the weather gage, being closer to the south-westerly wind than the Dutch. Many of the Dutch ships were still out of action, well to the north. All along the line, ships were cannonading each other. As was so often the case in battle, the rival commanders had sought each other out: thus the Duke of Albemarle in the
Royal Charles
came up with De Ruyter, who was under way at last in his flagship, the proud new
Seven Provinces
, and the two mighty ships were trading broadsides. Ahead of us, Will Berkeley was particularly hotly engaged against Tromp’s flagship, the
Hollandia
.

‘It seems auspicious enough,’ said Francis at one point in the
middle
of the afternoon. And so it did. As yet, we had no casualties at all aboard the proud King’s Prick, and precious little damage, other than a few broken shrouds and torn sails. The fleet, too, was more than holding its own.

But I had an uneasy feeling, and as we looked out from the
quarterdeck
of the
Royal Sceptre
, I could sense that Kit Farrell and the other veteran seamen shared it. With the exception of the flagships, most ships – ourselves included – were exchanging no more than one or two broadsides with each Dutch ship that came up parallel with us, and we were exchanging them at a distance, causing little damage and receiving little in return. Albemarle’s orders were to ensure that the Dutch could not get near enough to board, but that, in turn, meant that we were not near enough for our broadsides to devastate the enemy, especially as we were not engaged with any one of them for long enough. With the odds against us as they were, the only way in which we could hope to win was by overwhelming Tromp’s and De
Ruyter’s squadrons very quickly, before the unengaged Dutch ships to the north could come into action. But with the firing as desultory as it was, and with the sea still too heavy for us to open our lowest ports and thus deploy our heaviest guns, it was simply impossible for us to strike a decisive blow. I still waved my sword and pointed it at the enemy to encourage the men, but with every successive broadside, I could feel both my enthusiasm and my vigour declining. Soon, a half-hearted stab in the general direction of our next opponent was the best I could manage. And as time passed, I could see more and more mastheads closing from the north. The unengaged Dutch ships were coming into the line. Soon – very soon – their advantage in numbers would begin to tell.

Yet still Mars, the God of War, seemed to favour the outnumbered English. During a lull when we were not engaged, I took a little bread, cheese and wine, and reflected upon the example of my ancestor, the first Earl of Ravensden, who had fought valiantly alongside Henry the Fifth at Agincourt. There, the odds were infinitely worse, but
somehow
the outnumbered English cut down the flower of French chivalry. I said as much to Musk, who seemed to think that the act of bringing me the wine entitled him to partake liberally of it.

‘All well and good, Sir Matthew, but your noble ancestor and King Hal were on land. Good, firm place, the land. You know what you’re doing on the land, not like this damnable concoction of water, wind and tide that’s called an ocean. A hundred things can go amiss in a battle on land and not affect the outcome. Here, though, the
slightest
shift in the wind, or the snapping of a rope, and all can be turned topsy-turvy in the blink of an eye.’

Proof of Musk’s philosophy came almost at once. Rochester and some of the younger, more fetching mates and midshipmen were at the stern rail, pointing excitedly towards the rear of the Dutch line, away to larboard. I went over and joined them, and saw at once that a great ship was on fire. With the wind so strong, the flames took
hold in no time at all. The hull burned from end to end. The sails blazed. Flames licked their way up the masts and along the yards. Great orange tongues of fire stretched out eastward, carried upon the wind. Even we on the
Royal Sceptre
, so far away, could feel the heat from the conflagration. The ships closer to the blazing wreck dared not approach her, so intense was the fire. Consequently, the crew was doomed. Through my telescope I could see the tiny shapes of men, some on fire, some turned black, leaping into the sea. It is one of the most paradoxical but most universal truths that the majority of sailors cannot swim; and even those of the Dutch crew who could, stood no chance of reaching safety in such a heavy sea.

‘The poor bastards,’ said Musk. ‘Not even the greasiest Dutch
butter-box
whoremaster deserves to die like that.’

‘Amen to that, Musk,’ I said.

The hulk blazed for the best part of an hour before the flames reached her powder room and she blew up, vast pieces of her planking flying into the air like paper blown by a breeze. By then I had more urgent matters to occupy me, but as Francis Gale said a prayer for the men of the burning wreck, one thought above all consumed me. The blazing ship flew the flag of the Zeeland Admiralty. Thus I prayed that she was not the command of my brother-in-law, Captain Cornelis van der Eide. Cornelis was a stolid, humourless man, but he was brave, a fine sailor, and above all, he was my wife’s brother; and I did not relish the prospect of telling Cornelia that her twin had perished, not by suffering the noble death-wound in the heat of battle that all seamen of honour dream of, but by drowning or being burned alive, the fates that all seamen dread.

For the next half-hour or so, we were engaged with a stubborn
opponent
that carried some fifty guns and flew the flags of the North Quarter Admiralty. The wind had now abated a little, and although
we still could not open the lower deck gunports, Burdett and his gun crews were able to maintain a more accurate fire. So could our enemy, of course, but this captain had a different intent. He evidently fancied himself a hero, and luffed up to bring his ship’s bows toward us three or four times, as if intending to come as close as he could into the wind to grapple and board us. But although we had less freeboard, we were still significantly higher out of the water than our opponent, and that gave us the advantage in small arms fire. Parks’s Marines swarmed to the larboard rail of the forecastle and into the tops, sending down a hail of musket fire onto the Dutchman’s deck and toward her
gunports
, trying to deter the gun crews on her lower decks. Much as I resented the presence of these new-fangled sea-soldiers, and disliked Parks himself, I could only admire the accuracy and speed of their fire. A very few of the Sceptres were useful with a musket – Macferran, up in the maintop with a dozen or so of the Marines, had been a prodigious poacher in Argyll, and could hit a deer or a man a quarter-mile away with the right weapon – but most seamen preferred the likes of the cutlass and the half pike, for which as yet there were no
opportunities
. But we were close enough to hurl
grenados
, and the men in the waist, martialled by Kit Farrell and Boatswain Uruqhart, were
throwing
them at the Dutchman with loud shouts and deprecations.

‘This one’s for my brother that you killed at Guinea!’

‘For God, King Charles and Mevagissey!’

‘Stick this up De Ruyter’s arse!’

The quarterdeck was a little more refined, but equally warlike. Francis Gale had tucked his cassock beneath a breastplate and was firing his musket with some skill. Musk preferred pistols; there was a persistent rumour within the Quinton family to the effect that he had been a highwayman in his young days, and he was certainly proficient with the road-thief’s weapon of choice. Above all, Musk was a fine judge of distance, invariably sensing the moment when the two ships moved too far apart to be within range of each other. Meanwhile, Lord
Rochester had discovered
grenados
with unconcealed delight, and was cheerfully lobbing them toward the Dutchman. But the noble Earl was hopelessly unco-ordinated. Musk and I both glanced at him in trepidation, fearful that he would release a shell at the wrong moment, or send it in entirely the wrong direction. The possibility of the entire quarterdeck of the
Royal Sceptre
, including the heir to Ravensden, being obliterated by a disastrous mis-throw from the over-eager young libertine, seemed rather more immediate than the prospect of any
serious
damage being inflicted by our Dutch opponent.

For my part, I maintained a steady fire with my pistols, reloaded and returned me with brisk efficiency by Kellett and my other young servants, Coleby, Smart and Denton. But the more I fired, the more I doubted the point of doing so. The sea might have been a little quieter, but it was still difficult to steady oneself upon the deck and almost impossible to take an accurate aim – even when we were within range at all, which was only for a few minutes at a time. All the while, though, our culverins and demi-culverins kept up their fire on the smaller North Quarter ship, and the effect on the latter was
becoming
apparent. Her rate of fire, both from her great guns and from the muskets on her deck and in her tops, started to fall away.