‘Give fire!’
All along the deck, linstocks were put to touchholes, there was a brief glimpse of flame and smoke, and then the great guns erupted.
Ryman had once been close to the siege train of the Emperor Charles when it opened fire, but even that was not as terrible as this. The ship seemed to be driven across the water, while the blast of the guns seemed to rend the very heavens. Thick smoke made the air reek of hellfire itself. Gun captains bellowed their orders. Some men screamed obscenities or prayers: ‘God for Harry! God for England! God for Saint George! Fuck the frogs!’ A chaplain, standing next to the ship’s wooden Virgin, intoned almost inaudible prayers. All the while, the ship continued its turn to starboard, the sails straining in the breeze, the timbers groaning. There was a sudden gust of squally wind, and some of the men on deck cheered. If the wind continued to strengthen, the English fleet would have a tremendous advantage over the French, who had nothing, nothing at all, of the same scale as the Mary Rose and the Great Harry.
But something was not right.
Ryman had to stagger to keep his footing, shifting more of his weight onto his right side.
He could see some of the seamen starting to look at each other, puzzlement swiftly giving way to concern. Men began to whisper. There was a great rending sound, like a vast tapestry being torn apart by warring gods. Ryman looked up, and saw that the mastheads were at a greater angle than seemed natural. The deck was beginning to tilt further and further to starboard. A pikeman overbalanced, and fell against his fellows. Unsecured barrels and cordage began to slide toward the ship’s side. Most of all, there were strange and terrible creaks from the hull, as though it was being pulled in every direction at once.
The first scream came. It was from somewhere high up, near the stern, perhaps from one of the young men in the admiral’s retinue. A young man who had a clear view of the scene unfolding before him.
An old man stood close to Ryman: impossibly old, among all the young men of the ship’s company. Who he was, what office he filled on the ship, and where he had come from, he could not say. Ryman thought his face was familiar, but he knew that was impossible.
‘No man thought to order the ports closed on the lower gundeck,’ said the old man, very quietly. ‘Not our mighty admiral, not any of them. Ports cut too close to the waterline in any case. So perishes England’s pride.’
A press of afeared longbowmen surged around them, and the old man was carried away into the throng of ever more agitated souls.
But thanks to him, Thomas Ryman now knew for certain what he already suspected.
The ship was no longer heeling to starboard as a natural part of its turn.
The Mary Rose was sinking.
* * *
Jack Stannard got to his feet. He could say nothing, think nothing, feel nothing. He could not pray. He could see only the great ship begin to settle onto its starboard side, the overset hull sinking lower and lower in the water. He could see men escaping from the doomed vessel. Some swung themselves down the ropes that towed the ship’s boats behind her. Others simply jumped from the gunports, or from the topmasts. Some clung on to forestays or backstays for as long as they could before they, too, went into the water. A few bobbed back to the surface, and could be seen striking out to swim for the boats. Most did not bob back at all. And those who did get away from the hull, to live or die in the sea, were few. Far too few.
At last, an unbidden memory of Alice came to his mind, calming him and enabling him to pray. He prayed aloud, in plainchant, for Thomas Ryman. The old man could not swim, but somehow, he would survive. He had to survive. He always survived. How could God intend for him to survive Flodden, and Pavia, and the end of the Dunwich Greyfriars, only for him to drown like a rat in England’s own waters?
There would be no glorious report to the king now, and no rewards. Harry the Great, and Lord Lisle too, would not care what John Stannard and a ship of Dunwich had done this day. All of them would care about one thing only, and remember one thing only.
Still the Mary Rose sank deeper and deeper into the Solent.
* * *
All was hell.
The water was up to the starboard rail, the tip of the mainyard very nearly touching the sea. Everywhere, men were trying to climb up, to cut through the nets, to somehow get free of the ship. It did not matter if they could swim or not; just get away from the dying hull, then worry about the sea afterwards. That was Ryman’s thought as he hauled himself up onto the rail and began to hack at the netting with his sword. Behind him, he could hear screams from below decks, where the great majority of the ship’s crew was trapped. Men were punching and gouging and stabbing and killing to get up the companionways, to somehow reach the upper decks and a chance of life. Some within his sight were weeping, some praying, some wailing. Soldiers were stripping off armour, hoping that they would stand a better chance of floating clear. But no-one would swim, and no-one would float, unless they could get through the nets.
Ryman held a strand of the net with his left hand, and tried to saw through it with the sword in his right. He prayed for strength. He thought of the Greyfriars, of all the prayers he had uttered there, hoping they would count in his favour now, and offset all the mortal sins he had committed in his youth. He lost his footing on the rail as the hull slipped away from under him, but still he clung on, his face barely above water, framed within a square of the netting. Still he sawed. But his sword was made for cutting and stabbing, not for sawing. Polished to perfection, it was a beautiful blade for killing, but a most terrible one for living.
The water was lapping into his mouth, nose, eyes and ears. His old dream came to mind, the dream of the ship of the dead, full of skeleton soldiers. Then Ryman thought he heard the voice of his Beth, his Beth Stannard, whom he had loved and lost in Dunwich so many years before. So very many years, long before she took the veil, longer before she perished trying to defend a statue of the Virgin at Campsey Priory.
Ryman looked one last time at his sword’s blade, saw it was less than half way through the strand of netting, and felt a sharp pull on the net as the doomed ship suddenly lurched further beneath the waves.
‘Farewell, my angel,’ he murmured. ‘Deo gratias.’
At the end, a curious thing happened. As he fought for what would be his last breath, the erstwhile friar thought he could hear the ringing of distant church bells.
Then the waters closed over him for the final time, and Thomas Ryman went to his Calvary.
EPILOGUE
MARCH 1547
Spring came early to Dunwich, and a warm sun shone upon the marriage of Jack Stannard and Jennet Barne. The sea lapped benignly upon the beach and the Kingsholme. Another buttress had gone over the cliff from the ruin of Saint John’s, and yet more of the buildings on the east side of the market square had been abandoned; but as the bride wished, the wedding was held at Westleton, a mile or more inland, where such concerns, and the eternal sea itself, all appeared far away.
It seemed an auspicious time. King Henry was eight weeks dead, and King Edward, sixth of that name, now sat upon the throne, set fair to reign for fifty years or more. The new sovereign was close to Meg Stannard’s age, and the rule of the realm was in the hands of Edward’s uncle, the former Lord Hertford, now the newly elevated Duke of Somerset. In some senses, though, it seemed as though Great Harry still reigned from beyond the grave. Above all, his wars continued. Despite the sinking of the Mary Rose, the French had not been able to invade, failing even to conquer the Isle of Wight, while the Cross of Saint George still flew from the ramparts of Boulogne. Nothing, though, was more certain than that the new King of France, news of whose accession had reached Dunwich only on the previous day, would redouble the efforts to recapture it. Meanwhile, the Scots continued perversely to refuse to do what England wanted, namely, to marry their little queen to King Edward. Although there was an uneasy truce, Meg’s great-uncle Spatchell was proclaiming loudly in his corner of the Pelican in its P
iety that come the summer, Scots and Englishmen would be shedding each others’ blood once again.
Jack Stannard was confident that if and when the summons came to set out the Navy Royal once again, Dunwich ships would be called upon. This confidence stemmed in part from his ongoing correspondence with Will Halliday, now principal clerk to the newly-established Council of Marine Causes, the body that had taken on all the functions previously undertaken by one man, the late William Gonson. The members of the Council complained of their workloads, and never ceased to express their wonderment at how all the affairs of the Navy Royal had been carried on for so very long by just one man. Benjamin Gonson, first holder of the newly created office of Surveyor of the Navy, took much satisfaction from such remarks.
It was a time of signs and wonders, which, as the ancients had it, often attend the passing of kings. It was said, for instance, that King Henry’s corpse, resting overnight at Syon in its journey to Windsor for interment, had burst open, the vile fluids from within dripping onto the chapel floor. Letters from the east claimed that the Grand Duke of Muscovy, one Ivan, had the gall and presumption to declare himself Caesar of a new empire, which he christened ‘Russia’. Then there were strange reports from Devon, to the effect that a respectable gentleman of those parts, who lived very privately, had perished by a strange accident, torn apart by a pack of wolves, or other wild beasts, that somehow found a way through the bolted doors and shuttered windows of his house. Some said that this gentleman had once been a Knight of the Order of Saint John of Rhodes and Jerusalem, and that his name was Sir Philip Babington.
A wedding, of course, was no occasion for the recounting of such horrors. Nor was it a time to utter too loudly the names of living ghosts, although many mentions of them were whispered in corners, especially when more drink began to flow. Peter Stannard, the last leper of Dunwich, did not attend the service, telling Meg that his appearance would frighten children and dampen the festivities. But she had overheard her father and his new bride talking, and knew that Jennet Barne had insisted the old man should not be invited. In this, she had an unexpected ally in Aunt Agatha, whose willingness to talk of her hatred of her father to Meg seemed to increase with every new month of her niece’s age. Of course, no invitation went out to Jack Stannard’s one-time friend and mentor, Jed Nolloth. He was said to have been set up in a fine house in the very middle of Southwold, to have been given a plot of land for a new shipyard, and to have been married to a wife thirty years his junior, some sort of distant kin to the Rakers. But his new neighbours shunned him; even Southwold men detested a turncoat, it seemed. His yard failed for lack of orders, and he had to find any work he could as a jobbing carpenter. Meanwhile, his young wife proved to be both a shrew and a notorious whore.
Meg was now of an age where she knew precisely what this meant.
The wedding was a well-attended affair, the guests relishing a little relief after a harsh winter and the manifold uncertainties surrounding the death of the old king. The bride was given away by her cousin, George Barne: a very rising man in the City of London, already an alderman (Meg Stannard had no idea what such an ‘olderman’ might be, as all men, to her, were older), full of ideas for opening up all sorts of new trades for England, perhaps even to this new, vast emptiness called Russia. He expounded upon this theme at great length to any who were unfortunate enough to find themselves within his earshot; Jack Stannard was one of the few who listened to him intently. There were Stannard kinsfolk of variously remote canonical degrees, even some from as far afield as Norwich, but precious few guests whom Meg counted as friends, with the exception of Joan Cowper. Tom was there, of course, as the son and heir of the groom, and had been dressed in a ridiculous-looking tabard which made him itch. To Meg’s annoyance, Tiberius was forbidden from attending the occasion: she had relished the prospect of the hound depositing a great, stinking turd in front of the altar at the very moment of the exchange of vows. She spent much of the ceremony urging Tom to do so instead, but her brother proved irritatingly reluctant to comply.
Will Halliday had been invited to the wedding, both because otherwise, and especially with Thomas Ryman dead and gone, Jack Stannard would have precious few friends in Westleton church, and because, as Jack said, without Will’s strong bass line allied to his own tenor, the singing at the service was likely to be lamentable. But Will had sent his apologies, for he had marital plans of his own on the same day. Ben Gonson’s elevation, and the apparent indispensability of both young men to Lord Admiral Lisle, one of the most important figures in the new government, had softened the once implacable heart of Marion Bartleby’s father, especially when a significant contract to supply pewter plates to the ships of the Navy Royal came his way. Ben Gonson himself had experienced the same sudden change of sentiment from Mistress Ursula Hussey’s father, and had already been wed to his lady for some months. Jack Stannard promised to raise a glass in the direction of Saint Michael Bassishaw in the heart of London, just as Will Halliday promised to raise one toward Saint Peter’s at Westleton.
As it was, Meg Stannard played her part splendidly. At her father’s insistence, she had carried sprigs of rosemary before the bride, all the way to the altar, hearing as she went several approving whispers about her poise. But she felt sick when she heard her father pledge his trothplight, and felt so again as she watched the newly married couple raise Venetian glasses of hippocras to toast each other. For she saw, as she was convinced her father did not, the way in which Mistress Barne – Goodwife Stannard, rather – looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and the set of her mouth as she did so. And even before the marriage, Meg had already taken more strappings from this new stepmother than she ever had from her real mother, or even from her father.
Despite all that, Meg would call Jennet Barne ‘mother’, if that was what Father wanted; but whenever she could, she would do so with her fingers crossed behind her back. She would lower her eyes and bend her knee dutifully, as a good stepdaughter should. But as she lay upon the bed that was already almost too small for her, waiting for the sound of the waves breaking on the Kingsholme to lull her to sleep, Meg Stannard made her plans, and then, when she was asleep, those plans turned into dreams. One day, she, not some little runt of a Queen of Scots, would marry King Edward, of whose height, red hair, good looks and intelligence she had been amply informed by Thomas Ryman some months before his death. In the fullness of time, she, as queen, would restore her husband to the true faith, lay a brass in memento mori to Master Ryman in Saint Peter’s church, then immediately order the burning of Jennet Barne as a witch, her incontrovertible evidence being the teeth. Then she would hang everyone in Southwold, especially all those named Raker, and level the vile place to the earth, planting the ground with salt, as the Romans had done to Carthage. (She was, as yet, undecided on whether a similar fate would befall Walberswick.) That done, she, as its guardian, would order the great Doom brought out from its hiding place in the Stannard warehouse on the Dain Quay, and see it raised high into a place of honour once again. With the divine force of the Doom as her ally, she, Margaret, Queen of England, would finally restore Dunwich to its former greatness.
Nothing, she thought, could be simpler.
HISTORICAL NOTE
While the Stannard family is fictitious, many of the events, contexts and characters in this story are not.
I based the accounts of the attack on Edinburgh and the battle in the Solent closely on the historical record, with two exceptions. Firstly, the Scottish warships Unicorn and Salamander were actually captured in dock at Leith; at least, there is no surviving record of them attempting to put to sea, so the battle that I have conjured up off Cramond and Inchcolm islands is entirely fictitious. Secondly, there was, of course, no fight between any English ship, be it of Dunwich or anywhere else, with a single French galley immediately before the battle of the Solent in 1545 (although Dunwich ships were certainly present in both the 1544 and 1545 campaigns). As far as the sandbank where both the A
lice and the galley come to grief is concerned, I had in mind the East Winner, off the west end of Hayling Island. However, the sandbanks in the Solent shift position so often that I feel fairly sure no-one can upbraid me for placing one in the wrong location nearly 500 years ago! Otherwise, the English invasion of Scotland in 1544, and the attempted French invasion of England in 1545, happened essentially as I have related them: as, of course, did the sinking of the Mary Rose, although there still remains debate about exactly what caused the disaster to happen. (The notion that the Mary Rose sank on her maiden voyage, rather than when she was a very old ship, is a surprisingly enduring piece of ‘fake news’.) Naturally, I revisited the ship, and the wonderful museum which now surrounds it, as part of the research for this story, and can highly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about the naval warfare of the mid-sixteenth century.
The Boulogne campaign of 1544 was the last time when King Henry VIII went to war in person. Annoyed by Francis I’s support for the Scots, and ambitious to regain at least some of the land lost to England at the end of the Hundred Years War, Henry made peace with the Emperor Charles V and launched a two-pronged invasion of France, the Duke of Norfolk leading one force to besiege Montreuil, the Duke of Suffolk leading the other to attack Boulogne. Henry himself then went to France to take charge of the latter siege.
‘Caligula’s Tower’, or the Tour d’Ordre, was a real place, which survived until, in a curious echo of the fate of Dunwich, the cliff on which it stood collapsed in 1644. I have invented the various specific operations in which Jack Stannard was involved, and compressed some of the events and context of the siege, but the essentials of the assault – the rapid conquest of the lower town, the undermining and eventual surrender of the upper – took place largely as I have described them. There are relatively few detailed sources for the siege: probably the most detailed is Antoine Morin’s verse history of the event, Chroniques du siège de Boulogne en 1544. Unsurprisingly, the French soon counter-attacked and very nearly retook the town on a number of occasions; it was finally returned to them in 1550, leaving the Pale of Calais as the only English possession on continental Europe for a further eight years. Ottavio Valente is an invented character, but a number of Genoese mariners served the English Crown in the sixteenth century, following in the footsteps of John Cabot, or, to be strictly correct, Giovanni Caboto; indeed, the grizzled old salt who points the way to the ocean to an enthralled Devon lad in Millais’ famous painting The Boyhood of Raleigh is meant to be a Genoese. The fact that Genoa adopted the cross of Saint George as its emblem long before England led the mayor of the city, in 2018, to propose writing to Queen Elizabeth II with a demand for 247 years’ worth of arrears of tribute payments.
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