The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (25 page)

‘Do you not see, Roger?’ I said patiently. ‘By lying here to windward, we deny the advantage to the Dutch. Even if some of Obdam’s ships break through the White and the Blue, they cannot weather the entire fleet, for we shall fall on them. And if any of our ships are distressed, some or all of our Red Squadron can fall down at once to their aid. By lying here and seeming to do nothing, in truth we do everything. We make it impossible for the Dutch to win.’

Kit grinned at me: the master was evidently proud of his pupil.

Suddenly there was a cry from the masthead: a cry to look out to larboard. I raised my telescope.

My confidence in the strength of our position had been misplaced, it seemed. There, to the west, was a huge Dutch ship, far larger than the
Merhonour
. She flew the jack of the Zeeland admiralty, and she had the weather gage of our entire fleet. Moreover, she was now bearing down upon the wind. She was heading directly for us.

* * *

The lone Dutch ship came on, seemingly intent on launching a
single-handed
attack against the entire Red Squadron. ‘My God,’ cried Kit, ‘what bravery! And folly, too, all in one! She’s but an Indiaman – a big Indiaman, but still a merchant’s hull, up against all this stout English oak!’

A Zeeland captain with the sheer pig-headed stubbornness to put himself up against the whole of the Red. A Zeeland captain with the skill to gain the weather gage, a feat that no other ship in the Dutch fleet seemed able to accomplish. A Zeeland captain in a huge Indiaman, such as the name I had read in the Dutch fleet list: the
Oranje
. I conjured up the face of my good-brother Captain Cornelis van der Eide, and prayed that I was wrong.

Francis Gale, who was better qualified to divine my prayers than any man alive, looked at the remarkably mismatched duel, looked at me, and said, ‘It might not be him, Matthew.’

But my guts seemed to be tightening; somewhere, somehow, an instinct was speaking to me. No doubt Ieuan Goch of Myddfai would have had an opinion upon the matter. Indeed, there seemed to be a dreadful inevitability about it all.

She poured broadsides into the first ships to windward of us, but did not tarry. Instead she came on remorselessly, the Zeeland colours streaming out proudly. She fired twice into the
Old James
and was met by a thunderous reply from Lord Marlborough’s broadside. Once again the great Dutch ship did not stay and fight. She kept under full sail, intent on passing through the Red and rejoining the rest of her fleet. Or perhaps –

I dismissed the incredible thought that occurred to me in that moment: that the Dutchman was intent on a single-handed attack upon our flagship, against the Duke of York himself. It was too much to believe, and in any case, there was no time for such contemplation. For the mighty Indiaman was now bearing down upon the
Merhonour
.

‘Mister Webb!’ I cried. The ancient gunner was in the waist of the upper deck, attending to a damaged carriage. He approached the quarterdeck and raised two fingers to his forehead in salute. ‘He will likely give us no more than a broadside or two as he passes – to starboard, by the looks of things. Reply as you see best, Master Gunner.’

The old man nodded appreciatively; he was evidently not used to a captain giving him such freedom.

The Dutchman bore down. Her deck was alive with men, most of them armed. What if I was wrong, and rather than contenting herself with a glancing exchange, she mounted a boarding attack upon us?

I had no time to issue new orders. The mighty Indiaman came up with our starboard quarter, perhaps two hundred yards away, and at once began a rolling broadside, bow to stern. Chainshot whistled through the shrouds near to me, severing them. Routledge, one of the master’s mates, screamed in agony as canister-shot struck him: I turned and saw him fumbling desperately to hold together the bloodied remnants of his lower jaw. I ran to him, but as I reached out, his dead weight fell into my arms, his blood staining my shirtsleeves. Yardley stooped down and took hold of this, the most promising of his assistants. Then, without ceremony, he took the corpse to the larboard rail and pushed it over the side. The Christian in Matthew Quinton rebelled at such sacrilege, but the ship’s captain in me nodded grimly in approbation. A ship in battle cannot afford to be cluttered with the dead; nothing is worse for a crew’s morale than to see the remnants of their messmates laid out in increasingly lengthy ranks upon the deck. Landsmen, safe and warm in front of their hearths, may think this barbaric and my opinion on the matter callous beyond measure. But in my experience battles are determined by the living, not the dead, and the time to mourn is when the fight is done.

Now our decks shuddered as Webb’s guns roared out, giving back our own rolling broadside in return. The air was acrid. The smoke from both ships covered us like the darkest of thunderclouds; for some moments I could see nothing at all. The Dutchman’s guns fired again. I heard a dreadful shattering of timber well forward. Incongruously, our ship’s bell rang and was then silent. As the smoke cleared, I looked forward and saw that much of the forecastle rail was gone, the belfry with it. Ieuan Goch and two of his fellow Welshmen were rushing to attend a blinded man whom I recognised as one of the Londoners. Contorted shapes upon the deck revealed where others had stood only moments before. Ieuan Goch picked up a nearly round, white and red object from near to the shattered belfry; it was only when he elevated it that it became possible to identify the bloodied remnant as a human head. The Welshman contemplated it for a moment, then threw it casually into the sea to swim with the corpse of Routledge.

Sword in one hand and telescope in the other, Giffard and I went down into the waist and picked our way through the carnage, him to larboard, I to starboard. One of the first men I came to was Macferran, slumped against the side of the main hatch; Hitchcock, one of the quartermasters, was pulling a fearsome splinter from his thigh with no ceremony and seemingly no regard for the pain being inflicted upon the young Scot.

‘Looks worse than it is, Captain,’ he said, wincing. ‘Not deep. No need to trouble the surgeon.’

At that the splinter emerged: a five-inch shard of bloodied oak. As Macferran grimaced, Hitchcock wrapped a rag around the wound. ‘Lucky Scots bugger,’ he said.

‘Hitchcock has the right of it,’ I said. ‘A few inches up and across, Macferran, and you’d never have fathered red-maned bairns upon any Highland lass foolish enough to take you.’

‘A good thing, then, Captain!’ said Macferran, as cheery as a man in dire pain could be. ‘We’re but a small clan, and ’tis every Macferran’s duty to people it anew!’

As I moved along the deck giving words of encouragement to the men, the great Dutch ship continued upon her course, sailing off to leeward. My suspicion that she aimed to assail the
Royal Charles
and the Duke himself appeared unfounded; instead, she seemed intent upon battering her way through the inner line of the Blue and White squadrons in order to rejoin her fleet. Thus her sternpiece was now visible, and the heraldic decorations carved in the wood enabled Giffard finally to identify her.

‘The
Oranje
, then,’ he said, although he pronounced it the way the English do when attempting to mimic the Dutch:
Urania
. ‘Whoever commands her is a true seaman, by God!’

Indeed he was. For I recalled reading my list of the Dutch fleet, and as I levelled my eyepiece at the quarterdeck of the
Oranje
, I could see the features of her captain clearly. ‘And the compliments of the day to you too, good-brother,’ I said.

* * *

And thus My Lord returned from his interview, in which he put bluntly to 73.4.28 that which had been sworn to him by Sir Martin Bagshawe
. So wrote Phineas Musk all those long years ago, employing cipher lest his words fall into the hands of the great man whose name he dared not record. The ink upon the vellum has faded only slightly as I hold it up to the light; rather, it is my old eyes that have faded. Yet my mind is still sharp, and I realise for the first time that Musk and Lord Percival must have had this meeting almost at the moment that the
Oranje
was making her first pass.

The two men were upon the Bank Side, in the shadow of the ruined theatre, close to where the Lambeth marsh began. There was no other soul in sight; even though the plague was still chiefly across the river and it was long after dawn, the south bank was as silent as the north.

‘So he denied everything?’ Musk asked gloomily.

‘Of course,’ said Percival. ‘He has a particularly convincing way of making aggrieved denials. And who are we to doubt his word? Thus, whatever we may think, it behoves us still to believe that there is, or might be, a foul conspiracy by twenty captains to betray their king and country.’

Musk was crestfallen. ‘And in any case, we’ve no time to get to the fleet a message suggesting anything contrary?’

‘None. Listen, Musk. Tell me what you can hear.’

With the city eerily quiet, it was possible to hear many sounds that were usually masked by the cacophony generated daily by the industries, animals and people of London. With less competition, the birdsong seemed a very crescendo. The Thames water lapped noisily upon the bank. And as Musk listened, there was a sound of distant thunder. Faint indeed, but there it was. Unlike ordinary thunder, though, which brought forth a few rumbles or claps, always getting nearer or further away, this was a constant, its note rising and falling, seemingly always the same distance away.

Musk knew full well what the sound signified, for he had heard it before: twelve years before, to be precise, when the cannonades of the great sea-battles during the first war with the Dutch were heard clearly in London.

‘They’re engaged, then,’ said Musk.

‘Engaged indeed,’ said Lord Percival. ‘So the truth of the conspiracy will already be exposed, one way or another. Let us pray that the god of battles smiles kindly upon Captain Quinton of the
Merhonour
and all our other friends engaged in this business.’

‘Amen,’ cried Musk with an unusual degree of fervour.

‘So, Musk, but one thing remains for us – the final resolution of our other matter. And for that, we must separate.’

‘Still to the destinations we discussed, My Lord?’

‘Precisely as we discussed. And, Musk, let us trust that this time we have a better conclusion to our efforts!’

As the two men parted, the noise of the distant gunfire increased.

 

 

 

A little time before the glass turned at eight and the forenoon watch began, the Union broke out once again at the mizzen of the
Royal Charles
. Yet again the entire navy of England tacked in succession from the rear, but now it was under continuous artillery fire – or at least, that was the case with the White and Blue squadrons, those more adjacent to the enemy. This, again, is a tale rather too tall for those young sea-officers of our time who hear me recite it. An entire fleet tacking from the rear successfully, not once but twice, the second time under sustained fire? They cannot conceive of such a thing, for such has never even been attempted again, to this day. But we brought it off
that
day, perhaps simply because the manoeuvre was so very new and thus fear had not yet been instilled into us by those fainthearts who ever dread the difficult and the dangerous. Thus once more the
Merhonour
lumbered around onto the new course to the south-east, almost crashing into the
Leopard
as we did so. Now we were ahead of the
Charles
rather than following in her wake, and with the likes of the
Mary
and
Plymouth
having fallen somewhat to leeward, we were headed only by a couple of the Fifth Rates. The whole affair seemed very chaos upon the oceans. But somehow the fleet completed its turn and fell back into a semblance of a line. Now the business of the day began in earnest. Previously we and the Dutch had passed on opposite tacks, inflicting only minor damage upon each other in so doing. Now, though, we were in parallel to them on the same tack, the very situation that Penn had originally envisaged for his invincible line-
of-battle
. Surely our superior weight of shot would shatter the weaker, smaller Dutch hulls. It was only a matter of time.

I could just make out Lawson’s
Royal Oak
in the far distance. Having been the last to turn when the first great tack of the fleet was made, he was now at the very head of the entire line, the great red flag spilling out from his foretopmast. The broadsides of his division, and of the White and Blue behind him, roared out time after time, returned in good measure by those of the Dutch.

From all of this, the centre and rear divisions of the Red remained apart, still to windward of the main engagement, still waiting to deploy where the need seemed most pressing.

Roger d’Andelys looked out over the scene and mumbled, as much to himself as to me, ‘
Ce n’est pas juste
. The others yonder, they take all the harm and death, yet here we sit like as though upon a mere summer’s cruise. Ah, the poor devils.’

I said nothing, but shared not a little of Roger’s disquiet. In Lawson’s division, and in the Blue and White squadrons, the casualties were doubtless mounting and good men were surely dying. By now it was noon, and the great cannonade had been going on for four hours; but the two divisions of the Red, including some of the mightiest ships of Old England, were still lying inactive to windward. I shot many a glance toward the
Royal Charles
and wondered what, in God’s name, the Duke was playing at. Or rather what Penn was playing at, for I had no doubt he was the man deciding when, or if, the bulk of the Red Squadron would finally commit to the battle.

Of course, my concern at our inactivity was grounded in my desire to see an English victory, and not at all in a selfish compulsion to obtain glory, honour and prize money. Or so I told myself: those who contemplated my increasingly impatient pacing across the quarterdeck and then back again might have regarded the matter differently. At one point I went down once more into the waist, both to take my mind off our inactivity and to encourage the men. But the exercise was futile. I was met at once by Julian Carvell’s typically blunt assessment.

‘Captain, sir, we’re as idle as eunuchs in a bawdy house. When the fuck will we get the order to attack?’

‘Ours is not to doubt the strategy of princes, Carvell.’

‘I don’t doubt His Royal Highness, sir,’ he drawled. ‘But as for that fat gouty craven Penn –’

‘Thank you, Carvell, that will be sufficient. Unless you wish to see both of us before a court-martial for slandering the Great Captain Commander?’

The Virginian, who had one of the fastest minds of any man I ever met, retorted, ‘Don’t recall anything about that in any of the Articles of War you keep reading out to us, Captain. In fact, reckon I could call the Lord High Admiral an addled fuckwit, ’cause it don’t seem to say that I can’t anywhere in the Articles. Sir.’

I laughed. ‘All the proud lawyers of the Inns of Court should be grateful you will never enter their profession, Carvell.’

But the men around Carvell were less patient and less witty. They growled with longing to be in battle, some no doubt to bring victory to England, some in hope of prize money, some in the knowledge that a swift end to the war would release them from this floating hell into which they had been thrust unwillingly. Impotent to expedite their ambitions, I retreated once more to the quarterdeck. Kit Farrell had his telescope trained upon the distant
Royal Oak
, perhaps three miles to the east of us and only barely visible through occasional gaps in the smoke and the tangle of increasingly shattered men-of-war. ‘Look there, Captain. Lawson is luffing out of the line.’

The old thought of treason crossed my mind again, but even my first cursory look at the
Oak
suggested that nothing could be further from the truth. The great ship was desperately damaged, with much of her rigging shot to pieces and her sails torn. But the same was true of many other ships along the line to leeward of us. Jordan’s
St George
, now occupying our old place roughly astern of the
Royal Oak
, seemed in a far worse state than her flagship, yet still she held her position, firing intermittently into the Dutchman opposite her. Something was evidently badly wrong aboard Lawson’s command, and word of it came to us soon enough. We saw the
Royal Oak
’s ketch put on sail and weave dexterously through the wreckage and open water that lay between her and our force away to windward. As she passed under her quarter I saw one of her master’s mates, whom I recognised from my previous visits to his ship.

‘Royal Oaks, there!’ I cried. ‘What’s afoot? How fares it with Sir John?’

The mate almost spat his answer at me. ‘Shot through the knee and too hurt to command,’ he bawled. ‘The master dead, the ship in confusion. It might not have been thus if you had kept station,
Merhonour
!’

I felt the words as a blade in the ribs: surely the man only spoke truth? For my impetuosity in following Prince Rupert into the first tack, a good man – nay, a great man – was perhaps like to lose his life, and the finest new ship in our fleet was maimed so badly that she had to fall out of the fight.

The
Royal Oak
’s boat avoided us in its return voyage, and I only learned later of the message it bore: Jordan of the
St George
to relieve Lawson in command, and thus hopefully to oversee the hasty running repairs of the newer and more potent ship and bring her back into the battle.

Now it was near two, and the issue of the day was in the balance. From our frustrating distance we could plainly see three or four great Dutch ships surrounding Sandwich’s
Royal Prince
, endeavouring to hammer that mighty old hull. Sandwich’s second, the
Montagu
, came up to her relief but was immediately attacked by the vast Indiaman that I recognised at once as the
Oranje
, the ship that had exchanged broadsides with us so recently. My good-brother seemed deliberately to drive his command into the
Montagu
; even amidst the thunderous crescendo of incessant broadsides, we could clearly hear the impact of timber upon timber as the hulls struck. Through my telescope, I watched Cornelis’s men swarm over the gunwales and onto the upper deck of the
Montagu
. It was the Dutch way: charge and board. If they could evade our devastating broadsides and come to close action, as he was doing, the day might yet belong to the Netherlanders.

‘Damnation,’ I cried, ‘the fight will be lost, and yet we still lie here like neuters – what in God’s name is that perfidious rebel Penn thinking?’

My answer came at once, fortunately negating my petulant and indiscreet outburst. It took the form of a blue flag breaking out at the mizzen topmast of the
Royal Charles
. It was the signal for the centre and rear divisions of the Red, together with the one stray from the van, to fall down into the melée.

* * *

Upon the
Royal Charles
, young Cherry Cheeks Russell, who recounted the tale to me after the battle, heard the Duke of York order his ships into the heart of the fight. Penn had been for intervening earlier, Russell said, but the courtiers around the Duke, Harry Brouncker the most vocal of them, had urged delay. Surely, Brouncker argued, English arms were so superior to Dutch that the Blue and White alone could defeat the enemy? Surely there was no need to place in harm’s way the precious life of the heir to the throne? James Stuart was known to be no coward, but such arguments must have weighed heavily upon him. At last, though, the Lord High Admiral reached his decision, much to Brouncker’s apparent dismay, and the fresh ships of the Red fell down against the Dutch. Alas, some did so more swiftly than others. As ever, and despite bearing up her helm and hoisting studding sails, the sluggish
Merhonour
wallowed in the wake of the faster ships (that is, all of them), thus causing her captain to resume his irate pacing of his quarterdeck. Meanwhile, Lord Marlborough’s
Old James
made directly for the relief of the
Montagu
, forcing the
Oranje
to withdraw her boarders and to haul away. Cheered by the arrival of the relieving ships, the Blue and White squadrons fell down with the wind to launch headlong attacks against the main body of the Dutch fleet. Almost six hours of relentless bombardment had clearly taken its toll of the smaller, lighter enemy ships; even young Russell, so ignorant of the ways of war, could see clearly that some of the Dutch were starting to give way before the onslaught.

The
Charles
herself made directly for the unmistakeable shape of the
Eendracht
, a long, slender two-decker flying at the maintop the torn but still easily recognisable command flag of Lord Obdam. The Duke of York remained upon his quarterdeck attended by his dog and the little court of Falmouth, Muskerry and Boyle, who laughed easily about the sport they were about to have with the Dutch admiral. Brouncker, unduly affronted by the rejection of his advice (or so it seemed to Russell), had moved away to brood at the larboard rail. Penn sat a little way off upon his chair, in conference with Sir William Coventry; the lookouts, high in the tops of the
Royal Charles
, reported that Obdam was in identical condition to our Great Captain Commander, wracked by gout and seated upon his quarterdeck. The young Duke of Monmouth was further aft upon the starboard rail, earnestly questioning Harman about the progress of the battle.

The two great ships came together, larboard of
Charles
against starboard of
Eendracht
, and their batteries roared out thunderously. Musket fire from the tops raked the decks. Russell looked upon the sight with wonder and turned to make a remark to young Boyle, with whom he had struck up a sort of fellowship in the brief hours that he had been aboard. But as Russell turned, the cannon roared again. He heard a sudden hiss and felt a rush of air pass his ear, bearing something upon it. He felt something strike his face. He looked up, and saw the strangest of sights. The three courtiers, Boyle, Falmouth and Muskerry, still stood there, still stood for the briefest of moments, but they no longer had their heads. Blood spurted from the torso of what until moments before had been the rising royal favourite, Charles Berkeley, Earl of Falmouth. As the three corpses fell to the deck, Russell turned to look at the Duke, whose hat had been blown off, but whose head otherwise remained firmly upon his shoulders. A head and shoulders that were now covered in the blood and brains of his dead friends.

Cherry Cheeks wiped a hand across his face, and as he later said to me, he realised that my nickname for him was more true than ever it was; for he, too, was bathed in the blood of the freshly slaughtered.