Sword of State: The Wielding

by Richard Woodman

  Little of Monck now remains: a few remnants at Great Potheridge House, some memorials in Scotland, a portrait or two, a London street and a Canadian seaway named Albemarle. There is also that scurrilous English folk-song with its telling refrain that ‘George Monck was a practical man’ and the slow and lugubrious General Monck’s March danced to by Morris Men and said to reflect the slow progress of the march south from Coldstream as a-waiting-upon-events. Nothing of note then, except, that is, the British monarchy and the Coldstream guards! But even these two institutions have long buried his significance in their own histories. Scotland itself would rather remember the disastrous Stuarts, cheerfully forgetting that the egregious pertinacity of that later – and ‘Bonny’ – Charles Stuart led to the ruin of the Highlands and the divisive destruction of the country Monck had tended so carefully.

  Not that Monck’s own dynasty fared any better than that of the King he restored to the throne. Monck’s sole surviving son Christopher turned to the bad. Having been married to Elizabeth Cavendish immediately prior to Monck’s death, and made a Knight of the Garter by King Charles II immediately afterwards, Kit Monck was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Chancellor of Cambridge University, Colonel of both the King’s and the Queen’s Horse, Captain of His Majesty’s Life Guards, Lord Lieutenant of Devon and Wiltshire, and joint-Lord Lieutenant of Essex. Endowed with the vast fortune Monck had accrued, Kit and Elizabeth threw themselves into the giddy, foolish life of Charles II’s amoral Court. However, after a less-than-successful period in command of an English force in The Netherlands, the younger Monck appears to have suffered a personality change, becoming lugubrious and introspective. He did, however, raise the militia of Devon and Cornwall in 1685 against the Duke of Monmouth, the rebellious bastard son of Charles II who disputed the throne with his uncle, James II, the former Duke of York (and was soon to lose it to his Protestant daughter and her husband).

  Kit’s wife, meanwhile, was showing signs of mental instability which may have been exacerbated by her husband’s distant appointment as Governor of Jamaica. Here Kit Monck showed some promise as a reformer, but was better known as a drunk who died at thirty five of ‘a tropical disease’. Sadly his widow progressively deteriorated, squandering Monck’s huge fortune and losing the Potheridge Old George had so assiduously saved and had been rebuilding. She died insane at the age of eighty, whereupon the creation of the first Dukedom of Albemarle became extinct.

  Finally, I must make mention of two technical matters. The first is dates. Although it may be argued that these have no place in a story, historical novels based on fact cannot ignore them. I have not troubled the reader with the vexations of the ‘eleven days’ that so upset our forebears when the country changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in the mid-eighteenth century. However, most modern accounts use the Gregorian notation insofar as years are concerned. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for example, assumes that the year started on 1 January (and which, curiously, Gumble notes as New Year’s Day, 1669!), which removes the necessity of conversion for the modern reader. Thus for us today Monck’s march south starts on the second day of 1660, even though he would have written the date somewhat differently, placing it in 1659.

  The second is of place names. Most of these are familiar to the modern reader but the Inverlochy where Monck’s subordinate Brayne commanded, was later renamed Fort William. It is also worth mentioning that some place-names in Scotland are duplicated. The ‘little Loch Garry’ that features in The Tempering, and near which Morgan so decisively pounced on Middleton’s unwary column at Dalnaspidal, lies alongside the A9. One might pass it without noticing it and it should not be confused with the more picturesque Loch Garry near Fort Augustus where Morgan had his precipitate encounter with the rebels.

  Richard Woodman.