by Angus Donald
‘Not just yet, Guillaume, not yet. But I do desire you to send a man to the castle and summon Colonel MacCarthy up here to me, if you please.’
‘Very good, monsieur!’ Major du Clos saluted and conferred briefly with a red-coated Irish soldier, who nodded and made off towards the tunnel that connected the twin roofs and also contained the stairwell that led to the ground floor. Du Clos followed the messenger out of sight into the tunnel but a moment later he appeared on the other roof, where he took charge of the cannon there, berating the gun captain in strongly accented English for his Irish idiocy.
Henri put the telescope to his eye, scanning the upper northern hillside where the English and a few battalions of William’s Dutchmen, too, were spread out in a smear of tents, horse lines, baggage carts, files of redcoats on the march, piles of equipment and the campfires of several thousand men.
Closer to the town, two lines of deep trenches had been cut parallel with the walls but a few hundred yards distant, and dozens of teams of mud-caked sappers were already pushing ahead, digging more trenches forward towards Carrickfergus, which would ultimately branch out sideways to make the third parallel line of trench works to surround the city. On the eve on an assault, these trenches would be filled with thousands of redcoats – mostly armed with muskets, although a few still carried sixteen-foot pikes – who, driven by the beat of a drum, would surge out and storm the town walls.
Henri swept the glass to his extreme left, over to the sea and focused on the six sleek warships of the Royal Navy, which he could just make out riding at anchor in Belfast Lough. He moved the glass inland to the old square Norman castle and beyond the western walls of Carrickfergus he could see another God-damned battery of English guns pecking away at the castle’s ancient walls.
Scanning into the town of Carrick itself, he noted the church spire of St Nicholas – that heretical Protestant approximation of a House of God – and a large stock pen on the far side of the main street. Taking his eye from the telescope, and rubbing it gently, Henri looked naked-eyed on the square open stockade and the hundred or so reddish-brown cattle that were enclosed. The beasts seemed agitated by the gunfire, moving constantly and occasionally crashing into each other and against the stout wooden bars of their pen. Henri could hear their distressed lowing clearly.
He lifted his eyes to the damaged part of the walls and saw with mild alarm that the breach had grown larger in the few minutes since he had last observed it. It might be wide enough to storm before noon tomorrow at this rate. He imagined a horde of Englishmen bursting through the wall, scrambling over the rubble, firing as they came. A wave of bloodthirsty enemies flooding the town bent on revenge.
I should not be here, Henri told himself. I’m not a man made for the blood and filth of a battlefield. At heart, I am an artist, a seeker after beauty.
He examined his work on the easel with a critical eye: a sweeping landscape of the town walls and the English positions, in browns and reds. He had captured the scene exactly. The painting was perfect, perhaps, the most brilliant of all his creations – and was there anybody in this miserable town who was capable of painting a piece of art that was its equal? No, what an absurd notion. Was there anyone in this arse-crack of a ville even capable of half appreciating his work? No! Well, perhaps du Clos. Once Carrickfergus has fallen, he thought to himself, with God’s grace, I shall return to my little office in Cork and henceforth run all my operations from that most civilised of towns.
Henri had taken the controversial step of setting up the headquarters of his secret department in a medieval tower in Cork – instead of Dublin or Waterford or even Belfast – when he had arrived in nearby Kinsale in March. He liked the town of Cork, it was small enough so that any curious strangers stood out immediately, which gave him a sense of security, and the local seafood was delicious, he found, excellent, even, for this culinary-impoverished island – but it was the port of Cork, with its regular, unimpeded flow of French shipping that made the southern town most attractive.
In Cork, he received regular supplies of fine wines and fresh clothes from home. He received weapons and money as well. And his junior colleagues in the secret department known as the cabinet noir in Versailles provided him with reports, too, on what was occurring politically in his homeland – who was rising, who was in disgrace. There was also the knowledge that, with the regular flow of traffic back to France, if he had to make a swift departure, there would always be a ship handy to bear him away. Up here, at the far end of the country, besieged by enemies, facing capture and imprisonment, he missed sitting at his beautiful escritoire in the little office in the Old Tower in Cork.
What sins have I committed that I should be stranded up here in this drab, uncomfortable and joyless place? Not a one. I have merely done my duty.
Henri d’Erloncourt had a right to be aggrieved – he should have quit the town of Carrickfergus more than a week ago. It was bad luck that kept him here. He had agreed to the meeting with his agent Agricola, in a rare moment of weakness. He had believed the spy’s claim that it was urgent and they had met in a deserted barn about halfway between Belfast and Carrick. Henri had come without his usual cavalry escort, at Agricola’s insistence, and only protected by Major du Clos. Yet the intelligence that Agricola provided was out of date – Henri already had the full order of battle of the forces that Schomberg had disembarked, thanks to French agents in the English city of Chester. Agricola had then demanded a large sum in gold for any future service, which Henri had provided in little chinking sacks from his saddlebags. Even if Agricola had not proved useful in this instance, this agent had regular access to high-quality intelligence – and that was more valuable than a few louis d’or.
After the meeting, on the way south to Newry to rejoin the regular Irish forces holding that town, the French pair had been spotted by an English cavalry patrol, one of several dozen that Schomberg sent out from Belfast to halt the predations of the local raparees. On catching sight of Henri and Guillaume, the English horsemen, hallooing as if they were on a Leicestershire fox hunt, had chased the two Frenchmen and their exhausted mounts into the only safe haven they could find: the rebel-held town of Carrickfergus.
Schomberg had moved the next day, bringing up twelve battalions of infantry and cavalry, and surrounding the walled town. His warships took up stations in Belfast Lough, to prevent any seaborne relief. And a few days later the big guns of the Artillery Train were unloaded from the transports and hauled into their positions. Henri and Guillaume had been in Carrickfergus ever since.
‘You summoned me.’
Henri turned and found himself looking up at a burly, angry-looking ginger man of middle years in a yellow velvet coat with a gold-handled sword at his side. ‘Colonel MacCarthy,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’
The big man’s hand was on the hilt of his sword, his face was the colour of a ripe plum. The afternoon sun gave the fellow a monstrously long shadow on the lead roof. ‘You . . . had the temerity . . . to summon me. I, governor of this town, was ordered like a servant to come to this battery, with all speed, to speak to you – a mere adviser, a bloody foreigner, to boot. You summoned me.’
‘I did – and here you are. Once again, sir, you have my profound thanks.’
Henri locked eyes with the furious Irishman. He did not flinch from his anger. He knew that Guillaume would be close by, and doubtless had a hand on the long pistol in his belt. Not that violence would be necessary: Henri was a foreigner, he was a proud son of France and the servant of Louis le Grand, the greatest monarch in all the world. And this furious ogre was no more than the jumped-up captain of an insignificant outpost, a caretaker of a flyspeck fortress.
Henri d’Erloncourt had the authority to send the French battalions home – the only reliable regular infantry that King James possessed – ending this war with the stroke of his pen. Or, if he felt the need, he could summon more troops from France to support James’s efforts. He could even, with the funds and fi
nancial instruments at his disposal, pay the entire Irish Army for a year – or let them starve to death, just as he chose. The two men glaring at each other might both enjoy the rank of full Colonel – but there was no comparison in the extent of their true power.
Charles MacCarthy also knew this. ‘So, what do you want?’ he said.
‘I thought you, as a gentleman of refinement, might enjoy admiring this rather good painting I have made. I am calling it The Siege of Carrickfergus.’
Colonel MacCarthy glared at the indistinct smudges of reddish brown on the big canvas. It might have been painted with excrement for all he cared.
‘Just tell me what you want,’ he growled.
‘I want what you want, sir. I want to delay the fall of Carrickfergus for as long as possible. That is our duty, I hope you will agree.’
‘We shall have to surrender tomorrow, monsieur. You’ll have noticed their breach from your fine vantage point. It grows wider by the hour.’ He made an angry gesture with one huge hand towards the town walls. ‘We shall be forced to hang out the white flag before noon. By dusk, God willing, we’ll be gone.’
‘I think not.’
‘You think not?’
‘This, my dear Colonel, is what I propose that we do.’
Chapter Three
Monday, August 26, 1689: Dawn
Holcroft Blood peered around the edge of the wall of the burnt-out farmhouse. In the first grey streaks of dawn, he could make out the silhouette of a sentry on the town ramparts a hundred yards away. Keeping his body mostly hidden behind the broken brickwork, he trained his brass telescope sharply upwards at the roof of Joymount House but could see no movement – just the bulky shapes of the gabions and the faint gleam of the barrel of the right-hand cannon.
The guns were silent. Perhaps the crews were still asleep. Perhaps the two Frenchmen had quit their observation post for good and were now snug in their beds inside the castle. Holcroft did not wish to entertain that thought.
It had taken him till the hour before dawn to get himself and his men into position. It could have been much quicker but he had felt duty bound the afternoon before to visit the No. 1 Battery on the western edge of the siege lines to make sure that its commander, Lieutenant Obadiah Field, understood his orders and was battering the castle with sufficient enthusiasm. Then Holcroft had revisited the No. 2 Battery to check that all was proceeding well with the making of the breach under Lieutenant Barden’s command, before riding up the hill to the artillery park to supervise the loading of the parts of an eight-inch mortar, its wooden platform, several boxes of hollow shells and barrels of powder on to two ox-wagons and begin the slow process of bringing them down as discreetly as possible to the remains of a burnt out farmhouse by the Antrim Road outside the town walls and a hundred yards east of the Carrickfergus town gate.
They had arrived long after midnight, undetected by the enemy, or so he believed, and in darkness and as near to silence as they could manage, they had unloaded the freight from the heavy wagons and set up the mortar on its square bed. In Ordnance slang, a mortar was known as a Humpty Dumpty, after a famous siege gun used by Royalist forces at Gloucester in the late civil wars, which had been placed on a high, flat wall and which, because it was overloaded with powder or just badly cast, had shattered upon its first firing.
Now, behind Holcroft’s craning body, out of sight from the walls, two of his matrosses were using ladles to fill the hollow spherical bombs with loose black powder straight from the open barrel, while the other three were sleeping, curled up in the corners of the roofless farmhouse and its ruined outbuildings. Enoch Jackson sitting beneath a smashed window inside the house was carefully cutting fuses to the appropriate lengths. It was a difficult task requiring great skill and years of practice – but crucially important if his plan were to succeed.
Even if the French do not return to the roof of Joymount House, Holcroft told himself, it would still be worth silencing the twenty-four-pounders up there.
He did not truly believe his own words. General Schomberg had ordered him directly to make a breach, and not to bombard Joymount, and he had flat out disobeyed him. If he merely killed the handful of Irish militia who worked those guns with his hidden mortar, it would not affect the outcome of the siege. Even if he killed the two Frenchmen, it would be unlikely to change the course of the engagement. He must admit the truth: he was deliberately refusing orders and putting his men in harm’s way, to gain a personal revenge.
He looked again at the roof with his glass but his enemies were still nowhere to be seen. Could they really have abandoned the position? No – impossible. He would not believe it. It was the perfect spot from which to observe the battle. None of the English artillery batteries had molested them up there – and they were too distant, two hundred yards behind the town walls, for any enemy musketeer in the siege trenches to trouble them.
Holcroft decided that he would do nothing until he could confirm that the Frenchmen were on the roof. Once the mortar opened fire, their position would be revealed – to the enemy and also to General Schomberg – and the clock would begin ticking on the time they had to destroy the Joymount battery.
Fifteen or perhaps twenty minutes was all they could reasonably expect. A sortie by the Irish from the town walls – even only a few dozen infantrymen, or a squad of cavalry – and his men would be slaughtered, unless they fled, which would mean leaving the mortar for the enemy to capture as a prize of war.
‘Get a tarpaulin over our Humpty, Enoch. It’s full daylight. Cover the whole works from any Irish eyes on the wall. And get all the men inside the ruins to rest. I’m going back to the No. 2 Battery to check on Lieutenant Barden.’
If Jackson was unhappy at being abandoned by his officer a bowshot from the enemy walls, he did not show it. All he said was: ‘Will you be long, sir?’
‘An hour or two, three at most. If I’m not back by noon, that means something has gone wrong and you should all withdraw discreetly, leaving the mortar here. If anyone asks where you’ve been, tell them you have been acting under my instructions. You cannot be punished if it’s your captain’s orders.’
‘Right you are, sir. You remember your Proverbs, of course: chapter twenty-nine, verse two?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Holcroft. ‘See you in an hour or so.’
Holcroft sprinted across a patch of open farmyard and mounted his horse, which was tied up in a half-demolished stable at the rear of their position. As he spurred up the hill back to the English trench lines, keeping the farm between him and the walls for as long as possible, he pondered what Enoch had just said to him. Proverbs 29:2 – ‘When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.’
This was an old game of theirs, to quote Bible verses to each other as a way of private communication. Holcroft had memorised almost all of the Good Book in idle hours during his youth, and Jackson had been a celebrated lay preacher forty-odd years ago. But as he rode up the hill he wondered – was he actually a righteous man? Or did disobeying General Schomberg’s orders make him one of the wicked?
Fifteen minutes later he dismounted at the No. 2 Battery, and was dismayed to see almost no activity. Claudius Barden was seated at a large, empty, upturned powder barrel sipping a mug of ale and reading a small leather-bound book with a fine gilt-decorated spine. The other thirty-odd gunners and matrosses of the No. 2 Battery were scattered around, some sleeping, or cooking breakfast, some chattering with friends, playing dice or mending clothes.
The sun was a finger above the horizon yet the guns were silent.
‘What is going on, Claudius? Why are you not firing on the walls?’
‘Oh, there you are, sir,’ said Barden. ‘Morning. Wondered where you’d got to.’ He stood up and put the book down on the barrel. Holcroft could clearly read the title that was printed on the spine: The Pilgrim’s Progress.
‘I have been . . . occupied . . . on private business . . .
elsewhere.’
‘Is that so, Mister Blood? Private business, eh! Don’t tell me you’ve found a nice Irish lass! You are a sly boots, sir. But fair play to you, sir, fair play!’
There was a clatter of hooves that prevented Holcroft from denying this absurd notion. He turned and saw, with a pang of guilt, General Schomberg, with two aides-de-camp, towering over him from the back of his huge black stallion.
‘What is the meaning of this? I gave you clear instructions, Captain Blood, to make me a breach as fast as possible. And now I see you, idle as a fire-side hound, amusing yourself with books. Why are you not working your battery?’
Holcroft swallowed. He had no idea why the great guns were cold and unworked. He opened his mouth to try to give some kind of answer . . .
‘If you’ll forgive me, Your Grace,’ said Claudius Barden, ‘we’ve no more ammunition. We used the last ball and last scraping of the powder barrel at dusk yesterday. We’ve nothing to charge the pieces with, begging your pardon, sir.’
‘Nothing to charge them with? There is a park full of Ordnance not a mile up the hill: four thousand barrels of powder, eight thousand or so balls, I have been told, wadding, linstocks, match . . . it’s a damned cornucopia of materiel.’
‘I sent a master gunner up to fetch supplies last night but Captain Vallance, the Quartermaster, was already fast asleep in his tent, and his deputy said he dared not release anything to us without Vallance’s say-so until this morning.’
‘Incompetence. Sheer bloody incompetence. How am I supposed to prosecute this war if my officers lack even the merest hint of professionalism. You should have woken that lazy dog Edmund Vallance, demanded the powder and ball. Threatened to report him if he refused. Dear God, I despair. And you, Captain Blood, where were you when this absurdity was taking place? Eh, eh? I placed you in charge of the Train after Major Richards was wounded and, frankly, sir, I expected more. Why didn’t you do anything?’