It went on and on, mercilessly wearing Anne down so that she too fell ill, though her distemper only took her from her husband’s bedside when she had need to tend to their son’s needs. The situation went on for so long that besides Clarke, Gumble, Morice and the occasional attendance of Monck’s old adjutant, Jeremiah Smith, few others – other than the doctors – visited the sick man or even asked after him. Though he wrote frequently, Clarges had gone to Ireland, Morgan was elsewhere and although he remained in contact, Monck’s newest acquaintance, the Earl of Craven, was busy attempting to wrest his vast estates back from those he conceived had stolen them from him. After his initial heart-warming concern, the fickle King found the distractions of the Court too strong. He collected mistresses with the same diligence Monck had once reserved for supply-wagons and kegs of black-powder.
Monck was, in effect, given up for dead, though upon the King’s orders, Fraser persisted in dosing him with nostrums, bleedings and cuppings, the application of leeches and all the quackeries at his disposal.
Only Gumble truly held to his belief that Monck’s life was not lost. ‘God doth not chastise his servants for their conscionable acts of duty,’ he attempted to reassure Anne. ‘His Grace was upon no sinful extreme as of letting the Rump of the Parliament govern for ever, nor of usurping power for his own sake. Instead he chose the way of justice and conscience, Restoring the King to his proper place, meting out just punishments, aye, even to Argyll. How in this did he injure the People of God? Indeed, he went to the extremity of recommending into His Majesty’s care the very trust of the people.
‘Your Grace,’ Gumble went on in words he would later paraphrase in writing, ‘I am rather inclined to think that this sickness that hath been laid upon him was inflicted upon him as an allay to his great prosperities, to teach him, in the very height of all his glories and felicities, humility and dependence upon God which is not an easy lesson for a man in as great a condition as My Lord Duke.’
‘Is such a lesson taught to like men? Is such a lesson taught the King?’ Anne responded sharply.
‘Perhaps, in other ways, at other times. Perhaps His Grace is especial, as his actions, dictated by God’s grace at personal cost, seem to me to show well. There is not a greater mark of Divine dissatisfaction than an interrupted prosperity in this life.’ Having delivered himself of this homily, Gumble looked at Monck who, at that moment seemed to be sound - and quite naturally - asleep. ‘The north-wind is more healthful,’ Gumble concluded enigmatically, ‘though the south is the more pleasant, and we all find it experimentally, that it is good to be afflicted.’
It was an argument in which Anne could see neither merit nor logic, though it seemed to please Gumble. To Anne, God’s love seemed as perverse as that of mankind itself, but she could neither say nor think such a thing for long.
Thus it was that in the first light of a winter dawn late in 1662 that Monck reached out his hand and brushed Anne’s hair as she laid her head asleep upon his counter-pane.
‘Anne?’ His voice was weak, but firm and something in it stirred her from sleep. She raised her head, her eyes bleary, unfocussed.
‘George?’ Her voice was tentative, uncertain, the tiny spark of hope alight. ‘George…’ She took his hand. It was steady; she pressed it and he did likewise. ‘George!’ She was on her feet now: the impossible, the prayed for, had happened. He had been restored to her. She put her hand to her breast, finding breathing suddenly difficult.
‘Anne, God bless thee. Bring me the boy that I may look upon him.’
CHAPTER SIX – LONDON
January 1663 – April 1666
‘Your Grace, by this letter His Royal Highness makes but a general demand. He speaks of victuals, water, beer, powder and shot but leaves the precise charges to your discretion, as he does also the detail, of which there is a troublesome want.’
For a month, England and the Seven Provinces had been at war. The acute commercial rivalry between the English and the Dutch had combined with the audacious rendition of the Regicides Okey, Barkstead and Corbett by Sir George Downing and others from their hideaway in Delft, to break down all diplomatic civilities. War was the inevitable consequence.
Monck looked up from his desk in the Admiralty office at the attentive young man. He had revised his opinion of ‘Mister Peeps’ whom he had first encountered nursing a small spaniel of which the King was fond on the day of His Majesty’s landing at Dover. At the time he had formed the impression of the young man as a somewhat silly and sycophantic follower of His Royal Highness, James, Duke of York. Now, as James was preparing to embark to take command of the fleet in his capacity as Lord High Admiral, Monck was beginning to appreciate this Pepys’ ability as an administrator. His was a mind similar, if not superior, to Will Clarke’s, commanding a wealth of detail despite his ignorance of matters maritime – which reminded Monck of his own – but which the young man seemed eager to remedy. It was a little like the blind leading the blind, but they should get along, he had admitted to Anne when he had told her that the King had requested he took up his office as a General-at-Sea, a term then being dropped in favour of Admiral, as the shore-bound arm of the fighting fleet.
Privately, Monck was disappointed that he was denied a sea-going command, but he was too recently returned from a long period of convalescence, most of which he had spent at Potheridge with Anne and young Kit. Here, Monck had put in hand the rebuilding of the old manor house, something which had given him a great deal of satisfaction, and Anne much contentment. As for Kit, the boy had been transformed, a mirror image of himself at the same age a delighted Monck liked to think, but without the temper he concluded ruefully.
Although the Dutch war drew the Moncks back to London, Anne was relieved that her husband was not bound to serve again at sea. His attendances at the Admiralty Board and the Privy Council found him charged with the considerable amount of organisation necessary to fit-out the fleet at Chatham, providing all manner of necessities, as he and Pepys now discussed.
‘Do you have the captains’ requisitions, Mr Pepys?’ Monck asked.
‘All but two, and them I am promised tomorrow.’
‘Good; then we may consolidate them by category and thereby claim some knowledge of the capital sum involved. You have contractors’ names?’
‘For every commodity save anchors, but the Commissioners at Chatham state, without argument, that they have sufficient for all the ships ordered out of ordinary.’
‘Very well, but ships lose them, that I do know, so do you see that some extra sheet and bower anchors are available, sufficient for a contingency. Indeed, I would have an inventory taken; besides anchors, cables. In my experience, apart from powder and shot, there will be a want of cable after the first gale or the first action, whichever is the sooner… Do you have all that, Mister Pepys?’
‘I do, Your Grace.’
‘Very well. Then let us set matters in train without delay. We shall confer daily unless you find it necessary to absent yourself, going to Chatham if necessary to shake the gentlemen Commissioners who, I have found, are like bugs in a rug, too cosy for their own good.’
‘I was hoping to go to the Deptford Victualling yard tomorrow. There is a dearth of biscuit on account of a want of flour and the contractors argue about how many times they must bake…’
‘Three, sir. Three at the least or it will rot in no time.’
Monck had thrown himself into his work as – so Gumble said, and he seemed to know – a thanksgiving to Almighty God for his recovery. There were those close about Monck who marked some falling off of his mental agility. Pepys, though in awe of him, took a young man’s view and privately ridiculed the old soldier, but was pleased as punch when Monck, aware of his reliance upon Pepys’s facility for detail, roundly complimented him.
‘I do not know what I should do without you, Mister Pepys,’ he had said. ‘You are proving to be the right hand of the Navy, and I am as thankful for it as I am that the two of us have been char
ged and left to handle this business. ’Tis far better than a council of Lords, for they would have vexed us with their attendance, yet accomplished nothing.’
Naturally taciturn, Monck gave no outward sign that he recognised his own deterioration of mind, though that of his body plagued him. He could stand only for short periods, and he gained weight, it seemed, with every passing month, but he bent to his task with his old fervour. The two men had a prodigious uphill task, for all must be done with speed and little money. There was no lack of vexations, with or without interference, but Pepys’s indefatigable energy, founded on the rock of his master’s imperturbability, began to produce order out of chaos. Threats of retribution, or the cancelling of contracts and entirely imaginary visitations by My Lord Duke of Albemarle, seemed to galvanise even the most tardy. Monck’s reputation combined with his miraculous recovery from near-death, invested his name with a peculiar authority, so that men whose fortunes rested upon naval supplies, even though they were notoriously dilatory in being paid, sought to ingratiate themselves with Honest George. Somehow, Pepys reluctantly concluded, a summons or order from Monck, the great, heavy and slow man of Pepys’s appraisal, seemed to tap a deep patriotism that produced results.
‘They serve Albemarle more readily than either the King or His Highness of York,’ Pepys remarked one day to Clarke, who attended his old master from his new house in Pall Mall.
‘He has that effect upon men close to him, Master Pepys,’ Clarke confided. ‘You will not perhaps ever understand why, for you will not serve under him on campaign, but you may take it that it is so.’
That evening Pepys walked in the garden of The Cockpit with Monck, who leant heavily upon a cane, but showed off the planting of shrubs that he had ordered.
‘’Tis a damnably dry year,’ he remarked conversationally, stirring the dry earth about the base of one thin and wrinkled apricot sapling that hung limply from the red-brick wall. ‘The want of water will see this fellow off…’
‘I hear there is plague in the City.’
‘Is there not always plague in the City?’ Monck asked, disinterestedly, fingering the tinder-dry leaves. ‘Where there is war or the poor in great numbers, there you will find the plague.’
‘This is, I am informed, a pestilential outbreak.’
‘Hmm. I am more concerned with the Dutch,’ Monck grumbled. ‘We shall find them ever a hard not to crack, Mister Pepys, you may depend upon it, but I flatter myself that we have laboured all we can to do for the benefit of the King’s service and place His Highness upon the best and most forward footing of which we are capable.’
‘Amen to that, Your Grace,’ said Pepys.
Within ten weeks of taking up their joint task, they had completed it. The fleet was at sea seeking battle with the Dutch, flying the flag of the Lord High Admiral and sundry other subordinate flag officers including Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich. Monck and Pepys thereupon turned to the matter of resupply, aware that York’s ships could not long sustain themselves and there was little in reserve. Sure enough, after three weeks of blockading the enemy within the Texelstroom and enduring a series of gales, the English were compelled to draw off to Lowestoft to restock with supplies – anchors and cables included.
Monck was at dinner in The Cockpit when Pepys arrived waving a copy of the despatch that told of an action fought between the two fleets.
‘Come in, Mister Pepys, pray take a seat. A glass for Mister Pepys,’ Monck motioned the servants, ‘some meat, sir. ’Tis a good saddle of mutton…’
Pepys made his bow to Anne and sat down. Monck waved the despatch aside until Pepys had eaten his fill and then asked him to read it. When he had finished, Monck expressed his delight. ‘Twenty ships taken! And two thousand poor fellows dead but that they cannot harm us further. And our loss only one ship…’
‘And an old one at that, Your Grace,’ added Pepys enthusiastically.
‘Indeed, but a thousand or so of our seamen lost, which is a sad blow.’
‘But Obdam is defeated, Your Grace. Well beaten it would seem by such an account.’
‘They are not easy to beat, Mister Pepys. You must strike them hard and often. The war is not settled yet to our advantage, not by a single blow.’
But if Monck anticipated further duties as the Duke of York’s surrogate ashore, he was mistaken. A sudden and peremptory summons from the King himself set him upon another path. Crossing Whitehall he attended the Royal Apartments and made his bow to Charles who sat at a table covered with a heavy cloth and weighed down with papers and despatches. These were chiefly piled before the chair occupied by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, the King’s First Minister and the Duke of York’s father-in-law. Charles waved Monck to a third and vacant chair, gesturing for wine to be set before him.
‘Your Grace cannot fail to have heard of the outbreak of plague in the City.’
‘I have heard of it, Your Majesty, certainly.’
‘I cannot think of a better person than you, sir, to take the necessary measures against it.’
Monck was astonished. ‘Surely, Sire,’ he protested, ‘there are younger, fitter and better informed men than me to assume so heavy a burden –’
‘No, George,’ remarked the King leaning forward intimately and lightly touching Monck’s arm. ‘There is no-one fitter, no-one with the authority, the standing and the common-sense to prevail upon others as you may do. You are well-known in London…’
Monck looked across the table at Clarendon who, poised with quill in hand, was staring at Monck. The First Minister lowered his eyes, dipped his pen and resumed writing. The smallest of smiles played about his mouth beneath his moustache. They had not seen eye-to-eye of late, especially over the King’s marriage to the Portuguese Princess, Catherine of Braganza. Monck had been in favour of the match, Clarendon in opposition.
‘My Lord of Clarendon surely has a protégé better able to do anything that I might do.’
‘You may require the troops, Your Grace,’ Clarendon said. ‘Who better to command them and enforce obedience than yourself, sir? His Majesty has want of your services.’
Monck looked from Clarendon to the King, whose dark, sardonic visage was half-hidden by his extravagantly wide-brimmed hat but the mouth made a slight movement, emphasised by his moustache. Monck bowed to the Earl from the waist, perceiving their strategy. Turning again to the King he stood and leaned heavily upon the table, smiling broadly.
‘I see the eloquence of My Lord Clarendon’s argument, Your Majesty, and confess there is good sense in it. I have not the legs to go into the country whither My Lord intends to go, and know my duty well-enough.’
He stepped backwards and gave the King a deep obeisance. ‘Your Majesty…’ Monck backed away, aware that he had stung the King for Charles’s wide mouth was set. There had been no mention of removing the Court out of London, but Monck, dull-witted old Monck, had divined their intention.
The King and his First Minister exchanged glances, but not a word passed between them. After Monck had withdrawn the King expelled his breath. ‘What an old dog,’ he remarked to Clarendon, not without affection. ‘Truly, My Lord, I do not know what I should do without him, for he is bidden, and he goes and one knows he will do his duty to the utmost.’
Clarendon nodded. ‘And he sees more than most, Sire.’
‘Far more,’ remarked the King.
*
‘You cannot stay in London, George,’ a furious Anne retorted imperiously when Monck told her the outcome of his audience. ‘I shall have none of it.’
‘It is not you who commands me, madam,’ Monck said uncompromisingly. ‘You have not yet risen so high, and thus far His Majesty enjoys that privilege.’
‘George! That is monstrously unkind of you!’
‘It is nothing but the truth, the other half of which is that you shall not stay in London.’ Monck’s tone mellowed; he was thinking of their twelve year-old son. ‘You and Kit shall go down to Potheridge �
��’
‘No, that I shall not do, not if you are staying in London. I shall go to New Hall; ’tis nearer and, from time-to-time you may find it convenient to visit us.’ Anne knew she was beaten.
‘Very well. There is much to be done at New Hall.’
‘Shall we take the Clarkes thither? Dorothy sent word that William is unwell… No, no, it is not the plague,’ Anne added hurriedly as she realised the interpretation her husband put upon the news. ‘She speaks of a weariness.’
‘Well, that is common enough,’ Monck grumbled, pouring himself a glass of wine.
‘You have worn him out, George. The poor man has not your strength which all say is remarkable.’
‘Do they, now? Well, if they do they do not know of the discomfort I feel in my legs.’ He eased himself down in a chair which creaked under his bulk. He caught her eye and saw the concern she had for him and smiled at her.
‘You are a great man, George. ’Tis flattering that the King chooses you of all men.’
‘Huh,’ Monck grunted. ‘He plucks me upon the string marked duty and will in a day or two, depart with the Court to Newmarket or some other such place where he may tumble Milady Castlemaine until his pecker rots…’
‘George! That is disgusting!’
‘I entirely agree with you. Perhaps it is more fitting that I call it his sceptre, for he demeans his office with its pokery.’
*
‘Sir William,’ Monck addressed Morice, who acted as Secretary to the specially convened committee of the Privy Council, as he wound up their fifth meeting, ‘do you make out an Order that without delay a new pest-house shall be built hard-by St Giles-in-the-Fields. My Lord Craven is, I learn, constructing another at his own expense; you shall send him a letter of thanks.’
Sword of State: The Wielding Page 14