McFeeley's Rebellion

by Theresa Murphy

  As he signalled Jack to move out with him, McFeeley had no clear idea where to find what he sought. It had to be on the lower deck, so he moved along the now deserted upper deck swiftly. Finding a hatchway, he lifted it and went in, sliding down to the lower deck, with Jack closing the hatch up above before joining him.

  Moving along the dimly lit gangway, McFeeley studied the closed doors, pausing for some indication of what the cabins might contain. Every door was bare, and he was wondering which were the quarters of Monmouth’s military officers, when a cabin door opened a few feet up ahead of them. A man clad in a long, red-and-white-striped-nightgown stepped out into the gangway, standing with his back to the open door, head drooping sleepily as an annoyed voice called from inside the cabin.

  ‘Where you going, William?’

  ‘To the heads,’ William replied with a grunt.

  The voices told McFeeley that these were private soldiers. This meant that the officers occupied cabins further along the gangway. It was useful information, but the big question was in which direction did the toilet the man was going to lie. If he turned left, then McFeeley and Jack could stay with their backs flat against the wall until he returned to his cabin, Should he come their way, then there was no way they could remain hidden. The man turned right.

  As the fellow came towards them with a slow, rolling gait, McFeeley bent and slipped his dagger from its scabbard. Straightening up with the knife at the ready in his hand, he knew that the next few steps the Monmouth soldier took would be his last walk on earth.

  The soldier stopped, and McFeeley felt Jack tense beside him in the belief that they had been spotted. McFeeley was ready to leap and was actually springing forward as the Monmouth soldier moved his hands. Checking himself, McFeeley choked back a laugh as the soldier lifted the front of his nightgown, farted loud and long, then urinated where he stood.

  Bare feet splashed by the gushing cascade, McFeeley, like Jack, moved not a muscle until the Monmouth soldier gave a grunt of satisfaction, dropped his gown, then turned and went back into the cabin, closing the door behind him.

  Made anxious by the delay, McFeeley moved off along the gangway with Jack close behind him. He estimated that they had reached the officers’ quarters, but couldn’t come up with a plan to find a high ranker without revealing their presence.

  He pulled in against the wall then, reaching a hand out behind him to signal for Jack do the same, as another cabin door was opened. Prepared for this to be an officer, McFeeley was staggered to see that the man who stepped out into the gangway wore a suit of royal purple. There was something about him, indefinable but very special, that cast a strange spell to hold the hardened, cynical Colm McFeeley in awe. For the first time in his life the sergeant found himself affected by the presence of another person. It wasn’t like the power a woman holds over a man, a power that flees at the end of the sensational sex act. This man exuded some kind of energy that McFeeley had to fight against to avoid being overwhelmed. He was young and graceful, and even the dim light in the gangway caused the silver cross of the Knight of the Garter to sparkle brilliantly on his breast. McFeeley knew that this was the enemy. This was the Duke of Monmouth.

  Speaking in through the open doorway, the duke said, ‘A very good night to you, Clarence.’

  With that, the duke walked away from where McFeeley and Jack stood, the former unable to believe the lucky break he had just stumbled upon. Whoever was in the cabin was a high ranker. It is doubtful that the duke would have visited anyone but his second-in-command. Drawing his knife as the door was quietly closed, McFeeley gestured for Jack to do the same.

  They stood one each side of the door as McFeeley turned the handle slowly. Feeling it give, he gave a quick nod of his head to Jack and they both jumped into the room.

  Standing sideways to them, partway through unbuttoning the tunic of a colonel, his elderly face frozen in a network of lined surprise, was a man of short stature whose white hair contained just a few flecks of black as a reminder of the colour it had once been. A sword was propped in its scabbard close to him, resting against the bunk. An alert McFeeley stepped closer, his knife held in a threatening way before he saw the idea of grabbing the sword cancelled out in the colonel’s eyes.

  A quick glance around the cabin told McFeeley that he was really in luck. The green and gold flag of rebellion was propped in one corner waiting to be taken ashore and erected. Charts were pinned to the walls and papers that included graphs were littering a small table. The ideal prisoner had fallen into McFeeley’s hands.

  Still not recovered from having two naked men come crashing into his cabin, the colonel flinched as McFeeley brought the point of his dagger up to press lightly against a prominent Adam’s apple that protruded through the open collar of the tunic.

  ‘Up on deck!’ McFeeley ordered.

  ‘Who are you?’ the colonel demanded, regaining some of his composure and courage.

  ‘No questions, just move,’ McFeeley said.

  ‘I am a colonel, sir, Colonel Clarence Calvert,’ the colonel said haughtily. ‘I soldiered under Cromwell.’

  ‘You may have raped and pillaged, but nobody soldiered under Cromwell,’ McFeeley replied bitterly, pricking Calvert’s skin with the dagger just enough to cause blood to trickle.

  They got him out through the cabin doorway then. McFeeley and Jack were on either side just to his rear, their daggers held against the colonel’s back, demanding silent obedience. In this manner they reached the upper deck without encountering anyone. But as they closed the hatch they saw the silhouette of the sentry from earlier approaching.

  Pulling the colonel down with them, McFeeley and Jack crouched behind a capstan that was waist high. There was plenty of shadow to conceal them, and the sentry was passing, totally ignorant of their presence. But the sudden doubling up of his body had compressed the innards of Calvert’s extended belly, and his stomach complained with a grumbling that sounded like thunder in that still night.

  ‘Post number three…’ the sentry was yelling, bringing his musket round to them as Jack leapt over the capstan to land on the deck in the soft, sure-footed way of a cat.

  Knocking the barrel of the sentry’s musket upwards with his left forearm, Jack plunged his knife into the soldier’s heart, but was not fast enough to prevent a reflex action that had the sentry discharge a shot. The Enfield 1853 sent a bullet harmlessly into the air, but the blast of the powder was an echoing crack that would have been heard by everyone on board. Pulling Calvert to his feet, aware that they had only seconds in which to escape from the ship, McFeeley dragged him to the rail. The colonel, tripping over the body of the sentry, lost them time. A dual effort by McFeeley and Jack had him back on his feet, with Jack holding Calvert as McFeeley hurriedly uncoiled the rope from around his waist.

  ‘Get your clothes off, quick!’ McFeeley snapped at the colonel.

  ‘Look here …’ Calvert began an indignant protest, then gave a short scream as Jack sliced his clothing upwards, accidentally catching the skin as he did so.

  They pulled off the colonel’s ruined clothes then, ripping them away until he stood as naked as they were, his drooping stomach giving the impression that he had swallowed a cannonball. Tying one end of the rope around his own waist, McFeeley allowed a length of about six feet between him and the colonel before looping the rope round Calvert’s chest and pulling it up under his armpits. McFeeley then tossed the remainder of the rope to Jack, who allowed the same distance between himself and the colonel as McFeeley had, then tied the rope around his own waist.

  ‘Over the side,’ McFeeley shouted, expecting the colonel to move as fast as Jack and himself. But Calvert had dug his feet in, and they were forced to pick him up bodily and throw him, shrieking, over the side of the ship.

  It wasn’t what McFeeley had planned. Even though he and Jack wasted no time in leaping over the rail, the plummeting colonel pulled them awkwardly so that they hit the side of the ship twice before reaching the wa
ter.

  Smacking against the cold water knocked the breath out of them, and the struggle Calvert was putting up underwater dragged them down deep. His lungs bursting by the time he was able to reach the surface, the weight of the colonel on the rope dragging him back under again, McFeeley was able only to partially fill his lungs. Under the water it was pitch black. He went hand over hand and along the rope until he felt the soft body of Calvert. Then the hard muscles of Jacks’s arm and shoulder brushed against him. Relieved, McFeeley worked in unison with Jack. Holding the colonel, pushing themselves up to the surface with their feet, they were able to keep their heads and that of the colonel above water while they took in air as Calvert gagged and choked.

  Three muskets were fired from the ship, but the bullets went too wide to be heard hitting the water. Confident that the soldiers on board were firing blindly, McFeeley and Jack caught hold of the rope tight against the colonel with one hand and swam with the other as they towed him backwards, his mouth at all times above the water.

  Reaching the beach seemed to take an eternity, but then they were out on the pebbles, pulling Calvert ashore. The colonel had stopped coughing and, to McFeeley’s consternation when he checked, had ceased breathing as well. Rolling the tubby colonel, who had breasts like a woman, onto his side, McFeeley held his narrow shoulders as he thrust his knees into the soft flesh of Calvert’s back. Continuing to apply on and off pressure with his knees, although at first there was no result, McFeeley was then rewarded by the sound of a gurgling that began deep inside of the colonel to end with a gushing splattering of seawater out of his mouth.

  Still coughing and retching on the water remaining inside of him, the colonel was at least alive. They got him to his feet. The elderly man was a pathetic sight, his hair plastered to his face; body stooped, and stomach drooping. His genitalia had shrivelled. Colonel Clarence Calvert had been neutered by the cold.

  Retrieving their clothing from among the rocks, McFeeley and Jack dressed quickly. Then they took one end of the rope each to lead the colonel like a prize bull off the beach and up over a grassy bank. As dawn neared, the moon had retreated in anticipation and it was the darkest time of the night.

  From memory, McFeeley located the half hut, half dugout that he had found while on reconnaissance for the mission. Once used but since abandoned by either fishermen or smugglers, the small place had a sturdy door. When the colonel had been brought in, shivering and complaining that he was an old man, McFeeley tossed him a couple of fraying millers’ sacks to wrap himself in.

  Huddled in the sacks, body still shaking violently, Calvert sat on the earth floor as instructed by McFeeley, who took sheets of paper, a quill, and ink from where he had previously stashed them. Jack looked on, his face impassive, nothing to do because the colonel was in no condition to make a bolt for it.

  Making a pad from the paper, ink quill poised, McFeeley sat on his heels and said, ‘I want you to tell me, Colonel Calvert, what arms and powder Monmouth has with him, and then I want to have details of his strategy planned for after the landing.’

  Breath rasping now, a rattle of salt water in every breath that he took, the old man sat with his heavy-lidded eyes closed, shaking and shivering, trying to wrap the old sacks even more tightly around him. Jack, making one of his rare ventures into conversation, put McFeeley’s fear into words.

  ‘This old chap will die before we get a word out of him, Sergeant.’

  Not able to deny this, but not wanting so dire an outcome to be spoken of in his own voice, McFeeley stayed quiet. The dangerous mission, hopeless on the face of it, had been accomplished so successfully that he couldn’t bear to think of it all coming to nought. Still hunkering, he moved his feet to waddle closer to Calvert.

  ‘I want all the details, Calvert, and make sure that what you say is correct. We’ll be shutting you in here while we go to check on the information you give, and should you prove not to have told the truth, then we won’t return to let you out. Now, start talking.’

  To the surprise of McFeeley and Jack, the colonel spoke slowly, slurring his words, without opening his eyes. ‘We did it, General. God was with us that day. Tuesday, aye, yes, it was Tuesday. The third of September, that was when we showed them, General. For the small price of twenty English dead and fifty-eight wounded we killed three thousand Scots and took ten thousand prisoners.’

  ‘He’s rambling,’ Jack cursed.

  ‘Sssshh,’ McFeeley cautioned, an idea forming in his mind as Calvert continued to verbally fight Cromwell’s battles of the past.

  ‘Their stronghold was Edinburgh Castle, but, by gad, we captured that on Christmas Eve—’

  ‘Mr Calvert,’ McFeeley interrupted the lighted-headed muttering in a stern voice. ‘I am Commander-in-Chief, Oliver Cromwell.’

  ‘Sir,’ the old colonel, still shivering so much that his head bobbed from side-to-side, shouted his response respectfully, his eyes remaining closed.

  ‘I want you to give me a full report on this Monmouth fellow,’ McFeeley said in the same overbearing manner as before.

  Calvert obeyed the command, and by careful questioning, it took McFeeley just some fifteen minutes to learn and write down all that he needed to know. McFeeley made his notes: four cannon, a high but unrecorded number of carbines and pistols, five hundred pikes, five hundred swords and two hundred and fifty barrels of powder. There were eight hundred men aboard the three ships, but the loyal yeoman farmers, peasants and artisans of Dorset and Somerset who would flock to his colours, once ashore, would massively increase Monmouth’s army. Monmouth intended to head west through Taunton and make his headquarters at Bridgwater, from where he would march on Bristol with an army that, though rustic, would be some six thousand strong.

  McFeeley folded and sealed this report. Through the door of the dugout he could see the heavy red sun of a new day ease itself sluggishly above the eastern horizon. It was close to the time to meet with the messenger who would take this report to Captain Critchell, who would in turn take it to Lord Churchill.

  What Calvert, all the time gasping for breath, had also told McFeeley was that Monmouth’s first engagement on landing would be east of Lyme, at the town of Bridport, where the local constables were preventing eager young men from leaving to join Monmouth. There was no time for Lord Churchill to take army action to warn the militia at Bridport, so Jack and he would have to alert the garrison there.

  While McFeeley and Jack retrieved and unwrapped the muskets they had secreted in the dugout, and were cleaning them, Calvert, dribbling salt water, breathing noisily, had his head on one side and was mumbling incoherently.

  A seagull’s cry belatedly greeted the dawn as McFeeley went to the door and looked out. In the bay, boats were being lowered from the Monmouth ships. McFeeley discovered, and it unnerved him, that his eagerness to get into action was dulled by the image of the Duke of Monmouth that had remained in his mind since having seen the man who would be king on board the Helderenberg. Though conscious of where his duty lay, McFeeley couldn’t help but admire the young and energetic fighting man with the courage to go it alone. While pleased with the report he had compiled, and keen to get it to Churchill, McFeeley recognized that there was a significant part of him that would have preferred to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the inspiring Duke of Monmouth.

  Yet dreams were not for soldiers. Colm McFeeley had lived the fairy-tale life once. It had ended on a night of dense fog a dozen years ago. A lieutenant then, under the command of Prince Rupert, he had led his men groping their way over sandbanks to the Nore, where they had driven off the Dutch who had sailed up the Thames estuary with the intention of sealing off the English fleet. It had been a crazily spasmodic battle with the fog hampering both sides equally. For the first time ever McFeeley’s soldier’s mind had not been working to maximum capacity that night. Plagued by worry over Rosin, his wife who was due to deliver their first-born at any moment, he had missed the infiltration of his ranks by a squad of Dutch soldiers. McFe
eley had learned he had been outflanked when his sergeant major had died with a Dutch bayonet through his throat.

  That tragedy had been an omen of worse to come. Now as he tried to concentrate on Monmouth’s three ships he couldn’t avoid the image of Mother Shannon’s face that had been haunting him for years. The crone of a midwife had come running to meet him as he went back into camp on that terrible, foggy night. Tears streaming down her lined face, slack lips working over toothless gums, the old woman had broken the sad news to him. Rosin had died in childbirth and the baby had been stillborn.

  While still shattered by the loss of his wife and the tragic birth, McFeeley had been the subject of a military inquiry that had reduced him to the ranks. Over many long years he had gradually fought his way up again in his military career, but he had never succeeded in filling the void left by the death of Rosin.

  By an immense effort of will he shut off the past and came fully into the present. It was time to rendezvous with Critchell’s messenger. Going back into the dugout where Jack sat tinkering with his musket, McFeeley wanted to be on the move.

  ‘We’ll be on our way, Jack.’

  Getting to his feet, Jack gestured with his head towards the now quiet Calvert. ‘We won’t need to come back for him.’

  ‘I was only bluffing,’ McFeeley answered. ‘We’ve no way of checking if what he said was true, but I thought that I could frighten him into giving an accurate report.’

  ‘I knew that,’ Jack said as he tore open a paper cartridge, poured the powder into the barrel of his musket, and then rammed the bullet in. ‘What I was telling you, Sergeant, is that the old man is dead.’

  Possibly due to McFeeley’s train of thought while outside a few minutes before, this hit him astonishingly hard. Walking over to where the old soldier sat in death, he looked down at him. Calvert’s pride at being an ex-Cromwellian officer mattered not now. The colonel had gained the dubious distinction of being the first victim of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion. Yet this would not gain Calvert a place in history, for only Jack and McFeeley would ever know how he had died.