Sword of State: The Wielding

by Richard Woodman

  ‘I can see nothing very wrong in that,’ remarked Craven. ‘Indeed it seems a wise expedient, not merely for the relief of His Majesty’s Exchequer, but as an inducement to his men who ought not to be asked to fight, or even attack merchantmen, without some assurance of a just reward. Why, ’tis no different to giving over to the soldiery a place taken by storm.’

  ‘Quite so, Wilhelm, quite so, and had Sandwich confined the rapine to his men, he had no need to retire in obloquy.’

  ‘He partook of it himself?’ Monck asked, incredulous.

  ‘Most excessively; and moreover so did his officers, to the extent, or so I have heard, that his men felt the want of the reward they had been promised.’

  ‘What folly,’ remarked Craven.

  ‘Your Highness will forgive me for saying this,’ ventured Monck, ‘but such conduct is a perfect manifestation of Cavalier officers.’

  ‘You are perfectly entitled to that opinion at your own table, George,’ said Rupert, smiling. He and Monck got along perfectly, but their followers, being from opposing factions, cordially disliked one another and made no secret of the fact. ‘And perhaps, George,’ the Prince rattled on, ‘that is one reason I wish to have your plain-spoken help in our next encounter. Your authority in such matters would carry greater weight than any such proscription of my own. Besides I would wish to beat the enemy soundly, thrash them while their command is divided. So,’ he said as Monck leaned forward and refilled his glass, ‘I shall wish to confer with you as soon as is possible. You will likely have an audience with the King tomorrow, after which I desire that we set our minds to a conference.’

  Monck grunted and looked up and into Rupert’s handsome face. There were those that inveighed against Rupert, who said his precipitate action of the battlefield had cost his uncle a victory or two in the late Civil War but, if that were the case, he had learned from the experience. He had, Monck, thought to himself, a greater capacity than his Cousin, King Charles II. ‘Thank you, Your Highness, for the notice.’

  ‘We are to be shipmates, George!’ Rupert said with a laugh, smacking the palm of his right hand on the table so that the platters and glasses jumped. He looked from Monck to Craven. ‘A cavalryman and an infantryman together, eh? To drive the sailors, ha! Ha!’ Rupert laughed and drained his glass. ‘It is a pity you cannot join us, Wilhelm.’

  ‘I have already provided the Navy with timber, Your Highness,’ Craven said with an edge to his voice. ‘Master Cromwell, a contracted and reimbursed provider of timber himself, saw fit to order my sequestered estates ravished of their oak and elm; it is enough, I think.’

  Monck had gone directly to bed after his guests had departed, knowing Anne would be waiting. A single candle burnt beside the vacant half of the bed, but he knew she had been weeping. Without beating about the bush he told her the purpose of Rupert’s visit as he undressed and braced himself for her angry response. It did not come and he at first had to raise the candle stick to see if he had mistaken matters and she had fallen asleep.

  ‘Anne?’ She turned and faced him, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Are you not angry?’

  She sniffed, wiping her eyes with the sheet and nodded. ‘Of course I am angry, but you no more want to go back to sea than I to see you go. What can we do? You placed the King upon the throne and now he requires that you kill yourself in keeping him there. First the plague must be dealt with by you and only you; now only you can manage the fleet and beat the Dutch. Why cannot matters stand as they do now? You have done enough to have earned a respite. You are not the man you once were…’ She was rallying and although this precipitated an onslaught Monck was oddly pleased to find her spirit undiminished. ‘Are there not enough of those gallant cavaliers that so proclaimed undying loyalty for the King that you have to suffer and endure obligation after obligation all in the electric name of duty? Why you, George? Why you?’

  ‘Because the King cannot expose his brother –’

  ‘To death? No, of course not, but it is a wonderful thing to call old General Monck to stand in his shoes, is it not?’

  ‘Anne, Anne…’

  ‘Do not “Anne, Anne” me! The King begets bastards but the Royal prick cannot sire an heir that we must all keep His Highness of York in a jar of preserve! Why do you laugh?’

  ‘I had not thought of York in a pickle-jar,’ Monck chuckled and neither, it seemed, had Anne, for she too broke off and, sitting up, threw her arms about her husband.

  ‘Oh, George, George, what are we to do?’

  ‘What we always do,’ he answered, stroking her hair. ‘Our duty.’

  ‘But you are a great man, George. You are a Duke; you have earned your rest.’

  ‘With rank come obligations, Anne. Besides, great man or not, ’twas you who so strongly favoured the King’s return.’ He had her there and she sighed. ‘Perhaps we should think of the men who have no choice in the matter, the men pressed into naval service without a thought for their wives and children.’

  ‘What choice have you, George?’ she asked sharply, taking her head from his shoulder. ‘None that I can see.’

  ‘I could refuse, but it would result in a fall from favour that would humiliate you more than me and blight our son’s chances in life. Besides,’ he added, playing to her acquisitive nature, ‘there are rewards to a Commander-in-Chief that do not accrue to the common man.’

  ‘This makes me feel that the King regards you as a common man.’

  ‘Nonsense! The King has granted me privileges beyond imagination. You castigate his bastards, but if I am a Plantagenet, I am a Plantagenet bastard. And besides, Prince Rupert will be with me.’

  ‘He will?’

  ‘Aye. We are to have the joint command.’

  Anne sighed. Monck continued stroking her hair as she leant towards him again. ‘If I am killed in action,’ he said slowly, ‘which may be better than death by slow degrees and is perhaps the King’s intention, Kit’s future will be assured.’

  ‘I cannot contemplate your death, George.’ She clung to him.

  ‘He handled himself well tonight; I was proud of him.’ The expression soothed Anne, diverting her from the contemplation of widowhood to that of her clever son.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with something of her sharp tongue returned to her, ‘but Craven was importunate.’

  ‘He is a man considered by many as an eccentric fellow.’

  ‘Do you think he anticipated His Highness’s visit?’

  Monck chuckled. ‘I said he was eccentric, but not a soothsayer.’

  They fell silent and a few minutes later Anne was fast asleep. Monck lay on his back, breathing with difficulty and staring into the darkness. He did not wish to go back to sea, though the prospect had lost the terrors it had once had, and he might have thought that having brought Anne to a state of resignation, the end of the evening had earned him some rest. But something still troubled him and he was at a loss to identify it, aware that his mental faculties were slower than they had once been. He was, after all, an old man and it was only to be expected, like this damned asthma from which he suffered increasingly. He cudgelled his wits until the irritating fact swam back into his consciousness: it was the not knowing of Sandwich’s disgrace. Rupert was correct in saying that Pepys’s adherence to Sandwich might well have been the reason he had not heard from the most likely channel. That was not the point; the point was that he had not heard at all. Or had he? Had someone else mentioned it en passant, and he had simply forgotten? He dredged around in his memory and then he had it. He had heard, and from an unlikely source, quite by chance! A matter of sheer happenstance: of course! It had been Anne! Anne passing the tittle-tattle amid some inconsequential gossip from the Court that Monck never attended to, the King’s flagrant immorality being such a disappointment to the straight-laced Monck.

  Relief at having nailed the source was quickly displaced by something else: Monck was aware that his forgetfulness was poignant; it was not simply the effect of ageing, but of his two gr
eat distempers, the spotted-fever he had endured in Edinburgh ten years earlier, the lasting effects of which he had been warned; and his more recent and near-fatal disease. The realisation troubled him. He was a man of deep conviction; he had survived a score of sieges, skirmishes and general actions unscathed, believing that in some way he served God’s providence. His bodily weakness seemed something malign, as though those compromises and accommodations that other men saw as sins but which Monck had adopted as expedients necessary for the common good, had attracted providence’s wrath. In those self-exposing small hours of the night he was again troubled by his intemperate thrashing of Nicholas Battyn, to which there was also to be added the beating of Able Seaman Harris in Whitehall, and that of the unknown officer who had so provoked him on the march south.

  Troubled, he tossed and turned, slipping into half-sleep, then a profound slumber from which he emerged into the dawn, wakened by a nightmare of such vividness that he found Anne shaking him as he cried aloud.

  ‘George! George, my darling, what is that ails you? A dream, another dream? You are not well again. Oh, God help us if you are not well…’

  ‘I am myself entirely,’ he gasped, his body wet with sweat, his night-shirt sodden. But the fear had abated and he nestled against Anne. ‘I am quite well, Nan. Quite well, I thank you. Come, it is yet early. Let us sleep.’

  And so they did, clasped in each other’s arms like the passionate lovers they had once been.

  CHAPTER SEVEN – THE NORTH SEA

  June – September 1666

  ‘This is that of which disasters are made, Your Grace.’

  Captain Sir John Kempthorne looked at his Commander-in-Chief who was staring out through the stern windows of the great cabin, peering at the first light of the summer dawn. He stood awkwardly, supporting himself against the lazy roll of the ship even though she lay at anchor. Even in such circumstances, My Lord Duke of Albemarle had no sea-legs, a fact noted by Kempthorne with some misgivings. The Royal Charles lay athwart wind and tide off the North Foreland of Kent, and Monck, turning inboard to address the business of the day, found it necessary to lean against his cabin table. His legs pained him severely and he knew that he would never acquire that sprightliness of balance the seasoned sea-officers such as Kempthorne displayed. Such felicity was for younger men.

  ‘Dividing the fleet was not intended, but then it was not expected to deal with two threats.’ Monck said, feeling again the burden of high command descend upon him. ‘Take a seat, sir.’ Monck indicated a chair to Kempthorne and motioned to the waiting servant. ‘Wine, if you please. And be so good as to pass word for Sir William.’ Monck gave Kempthorne a wan smile. ‘Now, your charts, if you please.’

  Monck swept aside the litter of papers, the victualing returns and requisitions that had been brought to him that morning and were the sharp-end of what he and Pepys had been working on ashore all those months earlier. ‘Not until we master those villains of contractors shall we have a fleet capable of keeping the sea for long,’ he growled conversationally as Kempthorne unrolled upon the space Monck had cleared, the charts he had brought into the great cabin. The fleet had been awaiting the arrival of sufficient powder and shot to meet the enemy and this had only arrived the previous afternoon in the hoys sent from Chatham. It had taken the reminder of the day for their lading to be disposed of among the men-at-war anchored in The Downs and now Monck was eager to move against the Dutch.

  As he and Kempthorne settled themselves they were joined by Sir William Clarke who occupied the third chair, next to Kempthorne and opposite Monck.

  ‘Good morning, Will.’

  ‘Good morning, Your Grace, Sir John.’

  ‘Sir William.’

  The men made their courteous half-bows to each other and Clarke riffled his papers. He had insisted upon joining his old chief once word had got out that Monck was to hoist his flag again. Monck had refused his offer, but Clarke had insisted. It was, he claimed, a matter of honour. Monck was touched and, in view of his own misgivings as to his ability to carry out his high-office thanks to the infirmity of his body, he had consented to Clarke’s accompanying him.

  ‘The first of the barges is coming alongside now, Your Grace,’ Clarke advised, referring to the arrival of the fleet’s admirals and flag-captains for the Council-of-War Monck had summoned ‘before sunrise’. The three men then fell to a brief preparatory discussion as to the current state of the fleet and its most urgent wants. As they concluded their deliberations the first group of Monck’s subordinate flag-officers was announced and Monck rose to greet them.

  ‘Do you send that to Deal immediately, Captain,’ Monck ordered Kempthorne, indicating the letter Will Clarke was just then sealing. Turning it over, he added the superscription and passed it to Kempthorne. ‘That will give Master Pepys something to get his teeth into,’ Monck said, turning to the almost ridiculously young Vice Admiral Berkeley who led the van of Sir George Ayscue’s White Squadron. Berkeley was accompanied by Rear Admiral Harman whose five ships formed the rear, followed by Ayscue himself, fresh-faced from his barber aboard his flag-ship, the 92-gun Royal Prince.

  ‘’Tis appropriate that the forward most squadron arrives first,’ Monck welcomed them affably, as the Vice and Rear Admirals of his own Red, or Centre, Squadron, made their appearance. He shook hands with Vice Admiral Sir Joseph Jordan and Rear Admiral Sir Robert Holmes, their flags flying in the Royal Oak and Defiance respectively. Finally, the boats of the Blue, or Rear Squadron, delivered Vice Sir Thomas Teddeman and Rear Admiral Richard Utber to the gathering. As wine was served Monck called them to order and dealt swiftly with a point of formal command arising from the absence of the admiral commanding the Blue Squadron, who was victualing his flag-ship, the Mary, in Portsmouth.

  ‘In the absence of the proper flag-officer, Sir Thomas Teddeman will assume command of the Rear Squadron,’ he said shortly. ‘Now, gather round, if you please, gentlemen.’ The ring of bewigged officers closed round the table upon which Kempthorne’s charts lay. Several had been less-careful of their toilet than Ayscue and rubbed stubbly cheeks or scratched heads itchy under their wigs. Some still stank of sleep and last night’s indulgences. A man known for his own ability to drink deep, Monck nevertheless viewed the more jaded of them with disapproval; then, like them, he bent over the charts.

  These showed the whole expanse of the southern North Sea below a line between Great Yarmouth in the west and the island of Texel in the east. The shorelines eventually closed to the narrow strait between Cap Gris Nez in France and the South Foreland of England. In this vast triangle, the sea was littered with shoals. Off the English coast lay the Aldeburgh Napes, the Shipwash and the Galloper Banks, the Inner and Outer Gabbards; and, further south barring the Thames Estuary, the Kentish Knock. Beyond this to the west the estuary was bestrewn with shallows, the deeps of the several channels seaming sinuously towards the Sea-Reach of the Thames and the debouchement of the River Medway at the Nore. Choking the Dover Strait was the Goodwin Sands, known to seamen as ‘the great ship-swallower,’ for once aground there it was said to be impossible to refloat a ship. Running eastwards parallel to the coast of Flanders and then northwards, along the coast of Holland, extended a whole sunken archipelago of sand-banks: the Sandettié Bank, the Nieuwpoort and Ostende Banks, the Ruytingens, Inner and Outer, the North, East and West Hinders, the Schouwen, Ridge and Haak Sands. They gave the Dutch fleet numerous anchorages from which they might lie secure from the deeper-draughted English vessels which could not penetrate these shallows.

  ‘We have sixty men-o’-war,’ Monck began, summarising the situation, ‘and we hourly expect news of the enemy’s movements by the Lark – here – or the Pearl – here.’ Monck leaned across the chart to indicate the cruising grounds of the two fly-boats, the Lark plying between the Kentish Knock and the Galloper, the Pearl to the north-east of the North Foreland feeling for soundings on the Falls Bank.

  ‘We also have a fire-ship off the Ness,’ he added, laying hi
s right index finger on the area east of Orfordness. ‘And with the wind so lately in the east, the Dutch will already be at sea, so I do not think it will be more than a few hours before we have certain knowledge of them, even in this hazy weather.’ Monck waited a moment as the assembly jostled for a better view of the charts, then settled to hear what Monck had yet to say.

  ‘De Ruyter will make for the Strait of Dover to interpose between us and Prince Rupert’s fleet,’ Monck said. ‘We know that from our intelligencers. But he cannot go further without exposing his own coast, so we remain here until he is sighted for. Once he finds the strait clear,’ Monck indicated the Dover Strait to the south of them, ‘then he will turn north and seek us out, to defeat us in detail before we are reinforced.’ Monck paused and looked round. His colleagues were all nodding gravely; no-one, it was clear, dissented from Monck’s view.

  ‘It is certain,’ he resumed, ‘that De Ruyter’s fleet will out-number our own but the generality of his ships are lighter, shallower in their draught and, while this gives them an advantage in that they can slip over some of the shoals and defy us, their vessels do not bear the weight of metal that we do. This, to some extent mitigates in our favour but we have most recently learned that they now possess larger and deeper men-o’-war of which we must beware. Furthermore, and I urge your attention upon this point, gentlemen, one upon which I was insistent in the last war: we are best served if our fire is concentrated and we fight in strict line, head-to-tail, stem-to-stern in close battle-array… two… er…’

  ‘Cables,’ someone suggested, mentioning the unit by which a nautical mile was divided into ten, a fact Monck’s nautical knowledge did not apparently extend to.

  ‘Aye, cables. Two cables to be the distance between us.’

  ‘What about shifts in the wind, Your Grace? Such an eventuality would disrupt us, particularly if the enemy break our line?’ asked Ayscue. Monck guessed he was speaking for many of them who had not fought alongside him before.