Blood's Campaign

by Angus Donald

  ‘Don’t you worry yourself too much down here, Blood. Mack will not betray you, and neither will any of his folk. And I have a snippet of news that will lift your heathen Protestant heart. The great Earl of Marlborough is on the way here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Holcroft. ‘You told me that before. In the cell.’

  ‘No, you misunderstand. Your man, the Earl of Marlborough, is coming here with an English army. To Cork. Most of our lads are at Limerick recovering from the fight. A good many of them have gone back to their farms and families for the winter. The French have mostly gone now too. How long do you think Governor McElliot and a couple of thousand half-trained militia can hold out in Cork against a professional English army? A day? Two whole days? You sit tight in this nice cosy cellar and the city will be in English hands afore you know it.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Saturday, September 20, 1690

  ‘What in God’s name are we going to do?’ Governor Roger McElliot’s voice was a plaintive whine. He was a small man who tried to make himself look taller by donning a towering black periwig. He was standing in a vast reception hall in the Governor’s House with the Comte d’Erloncourt, and a pair of very different Irish peers – the lined, tired, sixty-year-old Earl of Tyrone and the young Earl of Clancarty, who at twenty-two years was bursting with excitement at the prospect of his first battle. He was accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Ricautt, who actually commanded Lord Clancarty’s troops, and who had arrived that morning with reinforcements, two full regiments of infantry from Charles Fort, which overlooked the port of Kinsale, seventeen miles to the south.

  The matter at hand was the sighting just after dawn of a veritable armada of English ships off the coast at the mouth of Cork Harbour. Civilian observers claimed to have seen sixty, seventy, even eighty ships in the first rays of dawn.

  It is Marlborough himself, they whispered. The Earl and his new army of brutal Englishmen come to slaughter them all and burn Cork to the ground.

  As if that were not bad enough, Henri d’Erloncourt had presented fresh intelligence that suggested that Ferdinand Wilhelm, Duke of Würtemberg-Neuenstadt, one of King William’s more ferocious generals, was even now heading south towards Cork with another army of five thousand Danish, Dutch and Huguenot soldiers, men who’d been withdrawn from the siege of Limerick.

  Cork was between the jaws of a pincer, menaced by land and sea.

  ‘We are doomed, surely, is that not so, gentlemen?’ said McElliot. ‘What can we do but surrender?’

  ‘We must fight them!’ said the Earl of Clancarty, his young face flushing with battle ardour. ‘We must show them we are not trembling cowards, that we will no longer submit to the tyranny of a foreign ruler. We will fight them from the walls, in the streets, in the houses, with every man, woman and child – we’ll show them that a single honest Irishman is worth at least ten Englishmen.’

  ‘Cork cannot be defended,’ said the Earl of Tyrone flatly. ‘Everyone with half a brain knows that. The city lies in a bowl, a marshland, with higher ground both north and south. The geography is against us. They will put their artillery up on the hills and rain death down upon us. We will be helpless. Pounded to rubble. But if we surrender at the first asking, perhaps Lord Marlborough will spare the city from pillage and sack. That, gentlemen, is the best we can hope for.’

  ‘What say you, Colonel Ricautt – you have most experience in these matters?’ The Governor looked up at the veteran soldier beseechingly. ‘What, in your opinion, is the best course of action for us to follow?’

  The colonel opened his mouth to speak but Clancarty answered for him.

  ‘Colonel Ricautt commands my best troops – they are brave as lions, every man, and he will surely wish to lead them to a swift and glorious victory!’

  Ricautt looked uncomfortable. It was plain to Henri that the soldier knew it was useless to resist the combined might of the two huge Williamite forces set against them but found it hard to contradict his patron Lord Clancarty, a man who, for all his youth and idiocy, was one of the richest and most influential landowners in the south-west of Ireland. He said nothing for several heartbeats.

  ‘The marshland and the River Lee can be used to our advantage,’ he said finally. ‘They will find it difficult to assault the walls of Cork over this terrain. But, in all honesty, I do not think that we have very much chance of—’

  ‘If I might interject,’ said Henri. ‘There is one piece of this puzzle that I have not mentioned. It is a very great secret, and I was told not to reveal it, but I think I should ignore that instruction in the light of the present circumstances.’

  Every man in the room looked at him expectantly.

  ‘I have been informed by my sources that the Duke of Berwick, King James’s own son, has plans to come to our aid. He is raising a relief force in Connaught and will be at Cork with at least ten thousand men in a week, or perhaps ten days at the most. If we can but hold out till then behind our walls, Cork will be saved and the English will be handed another humiliating defeat.’

  The Earl of Tyrone frowned at him. ‘I have heard nothing of this,’ he said. ‘Not a word. I did not even realise that my lord Berwick still had so great a force under arms. Are you certain that this is true? If we are to base our future actions on this information, we must be absolutely certain.’

  ‘My dear sir,’ said Henri, smiling warmly at Tyrone, ‘I am sure that you know that nothing in life is absolutely certain – except God’s infinite love and the promise of Salvation in Christ. But I have this intelligence on the highest authority. The Duke of Berwick will come to our aid. You may count on it.’

  ‘Very well then,’ said Governor McElliot, ‘it seems that we must fight. Now, as to our dispositions – I shall command the city and its walls and Lord Clancarty, will you take possession of Shandon Castle and the smaller forts north of the city? Will you, Lord Tyrone, take control of the Elizabeth Fort, St Finn Barre’s Cathedral and the southern sector? Let us consult the maps . . .’

  *

  As Henri d’Erloncourt walked briskly back down the main street to the Old Tower, he felt not the tiniest twinge of guilt that he had lied to the Governor’s war council. He knew for a fact the Duke of Berwick considered the city of Cork to be indefensible and, as far as he knew, the King’s eldest son was now ensconced comfortably in newly liberated Limerick and had no plans at all to ride to Cork’s rescue. The Duke was, in fact, considering taking ship at Galway and following his father into exile.

  But the commanders of Cork did not know that – communications between Cork and Limerick had recently been severed – and from Henri’s point of view, it was vitally important that they continue in their ignorance. Cork must be defended for as long as possible against the English. And for reasons far more important than the saving of one small Irish city from the ravages of war.

  Cork must hold out, so that the port of Kinsale should remain open to French shipping for at least another three and a half weeks. After Cork fell, and he was sure it would fall very soon, Kinsale would be next. And that must be delayed at all costs.

  When Henri had made the arrangements for his own departure, the war in Ireland, although obviously lost even then, had had a completely different aspect to his eye. The south-westen ports of Cork and Kinsale had seemed secure, or at least he had thought they would be, until spring. Accordingly he had arranged the rendezvous with the French frigate Hirondelle for the middle of October, before sea travel became seriously disrupted by winter storms, in Kinsale.

  Jean-Baptiste Trudeau, the captain of the Hirondelle, and a man who had been on the spymaster’s payroll for some years, was engaged to collect Henri, along with his man Matisse and possibly some of his agents, at dusk on Wednesday, October 15, and take him back to France. He had sent and received messages to this effect when he was in Galway, and he had no method of changing the date of the rendezvous. He had no idea where the Hirondelle was at present, somewhere in the Atlantic, he thought, alt
hough he was certain that Captain Trudeau would make the rendezvous – Trudeau knew what would happen to him if he did not.

  So Henri must remain in County Cork for the time being, and Cork city must resist the forces of King William for as long as possible.

  There was another reason for Henri wishing to remain a little longer in Cork. The Englishman Blood had escaped his grip with the connivance of that treacherous rat Hogan and taken with him various materials, papers and so on, which he very much wished to retrieve. That it was crucial he should retrieve.

  Holcroft Blood had not been seen, let alone captured, in the two weeks since he had escaped, despite a twenty-four-hour watch in the walls and all the gates of Cork. Neither had he been picked up by the regular Jacobite patrols on the roads leading to or from the city. Cork harbour, too, was watched all hours of the day and night, and every ship heading out to sea had been thoroughly searched. The manhunt had been vigorously prosecuted – and yet, nothing, not a hair of Blood’s had been seen. The bounty in gold he had placed on the Englishman’s head had been more than generous – yet no man had stepped forward with any information that might lead to his recapture.

  However, he had finally begun receiving reports from Agricola once more – Narrey had no idea why his agent had been silent for so long, but the renewed contact was welcome – and the spy had mentioned that Major Holcroft Blood was still posted on the missing list in the Board of Ordnance. Missing believed dead or captured. The man had apparently simply disappeared.

  In fact, in Henri’s estimation, it was most likely that Blood had gone to ground inside Cork – was indeed still in the city. In some traitor’s house. And Henri fully intended to sniff him out and take his revenge for the death of poor Guillaume du Clos before he had to quit Ireland for good.

  Henri entered the door of the Old Tower, and greeted the clerk, Jacob, who was sitting at his usual place. The man had a pair of pistols on the desk in front of him, which he was using as paperweights, and he looked up quickly when he heard Henri’s step, clutching at one of the weapons with his right hand. His face, still sadly cut and bruised from Blood’s assault, was pinched with fear.

  Once back in his office on the first floor, and having confirmed with Matisse that there was no new information about Blood, Henri sat down at the escritoire and pulled out the deciphered version of Agricola’s latest report. Much of the information in it he was already familiar with – the Earl of Marlborough’s imminent arrival, the ill-discipline of some of the veteran English troops in Dublin – but some of it was new. At Henri’s months-old request, Agricola had included a lengthy report on Michael Hogan and his large family, which made interesting reading. Apparently the Galloper had a number of family members, distant cousins by blood but comrades in various illicit businesses, in Cork itself. These cousins might bear investigation.

  However, reading through the document, once again Henri found himself distracted – in fact greatly irritated – by Agricola’s often repeated demand for more money, saying it was urgently needed to pay sub-agents who supplied small items of military information to Agricola.

  Henri had nothing against greed. He based the majority of his operations on the lure of gold. He trusted greed. It was a clear motive for treachery. He did not trust agents who said they loved France or King Louis enough to risk their necks, or those who said they hated the English so much that they would enlist in their ranks only to betray them. He felt that wild passions had no place in serious espionage. Greed, he liked. Greed, he preferred. He knew where he stood when an agent in the field asked for payment for their services.

  But Agricola’s greed was excessive. Almost every time they corresponded, the agent found another reason why Henri should part with more of his master’s gold. And of greater irritation were the lies: these sub-agents that Agricola claimed required extra payments. They were all fictitious, he believed, all fabricated by Agricola as a method of extracting more money from Henri.

  In other circumstances, Henri would have sent a threatening note of admonishment to Agricola. But that would have been pointless as he had no method of safely dispatching the note to Dublin. Michael Hogan had deserted him and the Irishman had been his link to a network of riders who carried his messages. Fortunately, it did not matter. Agricola was coming to Cork with the forces of the Duke of Wurttemberg-Neuenstadt. And there would most likely be an opportunity for a meeting once the enemy was encamped outside the walls of Cork. If nothing else, Agricola was always resourceful in these matters.

  Henri put the message down on his desk. He decided to wait for the agent to contact him. The reliable lure of gold would ensure that Agricola did.

  ‘Matisse,’ he said, ‘take a message to the Governor’s House for me. Tell McElliot that I shall require a file of redcoats first thing tomorrow – twenty men should do it. You may tell him I intend to search the whole city for deserters.’

  ‘Deserters, monsieur?’

  ‘Yes, Matisse. Deserters. That is what I wish you to tell our esteemed governor. Tell him that I deem it of the greatest importance that every available fighting man is found and compelled to do his duty in defence of this fair city.’

  Matisse knuckled his brow and disappeared out of the door.

  Deserters, thought Henri. Why not? In the course of his searches, he might even discover some. But of greater interest to him would be a thorough search of a tavern known as the Dolphin by the South Gate. A place that his own enquiries had revealed was owned by members of Hogan’s clan.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Saturday, September 27, 1690

  Holcroft had been increasingly irked by his voluntary incarceration. Particularly when he could hear the guns of the English cannon pounding the walls of Cork, and even feel them trembling the bricks of the cellar in which he languished. He had passed the time in thought and sleep, in eating and drinking the dull fare Mack and his friends brought down to him. And in trying to solve the puzzles contained in the secret papers he’d stolen from the escritoire in Narrey’s lair.

  By the time he could hear the rattle of musketry from outside the city, he had decoded every last one. But it had taken him two whole weeks before he realised how fortunate he had been in the items he had purloined from the office. The book he had stolen was, of course, the key. It was The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, published twelve years before but still selling in great numbers. A book that any good Christian might wish to have in his or her collection. Close examination of the groups of numbers in the encoded papers led him to believe that they corresponded to letters printed in Bunyan’s tale. Both correspondents would need to have the same edition of the book, of course, but after that it was relatively simple to exchange messages. It turned out that the day of the date written en clair on the top of each letter dictated which page of the text was to be used for the code, and the numbers in the message corresponded to which line on that page and how many letters from the left of the beginning of the line. For example, on page nine of the book, lines twenty-two and twenty-three had the hero, a man named Christian, saying:

  ‘I cannot go so fast as I would,

  by reason of this burden that is upon . . .’

  So if the writer wished to indicate the letter A, and was writing the message on the ninth day of the month, he would put in the numbers ‘22/3’, to indicate the third letter of the twenty-second line on page nine. Similarly, in a missive of the same date, ‘23/1’ would indicate the letter B.

  Holcroft discovered this by guessing that the letters would be written originally in French, Narrey’s own language, and a further line of defence against someone being able to decipher the message, and by knowing that the most commonly used letter in the French language was E, as it was, in fact, in English. Once he had worked this out he went through page after page of Bunyan’s work until he had discovered the exact mechanism. At the end of his three weeks in the cellar beneath the Dolphin, Holcroft knew a great deal about Narrey’s secret operations in Ireland, who
among the Williamite Army had been compromised, who had taken bribes, who was just a credulous fool. But, most importantly, Holcroft knew the true identity of the spy known as Agricola. At first he could not believe it. He checked again, and again. There was no mistake. The revelation shocked him. He was also deeply saddened by the knowledge, mixed with the pain of personal betrayal. There was a good deal of raw anger, too.

  However, he soon realised that, while his sentence in the cellar had been long and tedious, it had proved worthwhile. And tedious it certainly had been. The only break in the boredom during the seventeen days since Hogan’s brief visit, had come on the eleventh day, when a breathless Mack had burst into his hiding place and told him that there were redcoats at the door. Holcroft had been bundled into an empty brandy cask and the lid quickly nailed shut, to the Englishman’s distress. As he had breathed in the fumes of the brandy-soaked wood at close range, so strong that he felt almost drunk, he listened to Mack chatting amiably to a sergeant of Clancarty’s Regiment of Foot, who made only the most cursory of searches before repairing upstairs to the tap room for a restorative pint of ale and a nip or two of poteen.

  Released from the barrel, with the redcoats long gone, Holcroft began to plan what he would do, and how, when the city of Cork had finally fallen to Lord Marlborough. There was a reckoning to be made. Two reckonings, in fact.

  *

  In the early afternoon of his twenty-second day in that dank, dull cellar, Mack opened the door and stepped into Holcroft’s domain. He was carrying a blue military-style woollen coat with yellow turned-back sleeves and big brass buttons.

  ‘A little gift for you, Major Blood,’ said the smuggler, handing over the garment. ‘It took some finding – your man Matisse sold it to a gentleman, who gave it to his godson – but we managed to sniff it out. May it bring you joy.’

  Holcroft was overwhelmed with gratitude. He was speechless, in fact. He had not properly understood until that moment how much the old blue coat meant to him. A vital part of his being had been stripped away from him when he had been made a prisoner. And now it was returned – he was made whole.