‘Vive le roi! Vive le Prince d’Orange!’ said the girl merrily.
‘Vous parlez français?’ I asked hopefully. She looked at me blankly.
‘Even the Moors can manage vive le roi,’ said Charles. ‘Now, brother, you must rest. You will need it before mother takes you into her tender care.’
He prepared to back away, but I raised my hand as far as I could manage. ‘Charles,’ I said, ‘the business in England – the letter. It was resolved?’
‘Resolved in one sense,’ he said. ‘In several senses, indeed. For instance, the rogue Henfield will never betray another of our agents.’ My brother smiled enigmatically. ‘And the letter was delivered to its recipient. As to its efficacy, only time will tell us that.’ Another thought occurred to him. ‘Jack Wilson has written. He was feted as a hero, as the saviour of the Protector’s friend Lady Dysart. Cromwell has even promoted him to captain. But he knew you would wish to know that the man named Tancred feeds the fishes of the Medway.’
I smiled, albeit feebly. Tom Clarabut, my friend, you are avenged.
‘Charles – ‘ He was leaving – ‘My Lord’. The urgent formality stayed him. ‘What was it for? What was it all for?’ Through my pain, my voice was barely more than a whisper.
The Earl of Ravensden looked at me curiously. ‘What is everything for, Matt? Everything we do? Why do you bear those wounds, and why do I – do what I must do?’ His voice was even quieter than usual. ‘That England may have its king again, brother. That is what it is all for.’
* * *
After my brother’s departure, I endeavoured to find a common means of communication with the maiden van der Eide. This proved uncommonly troublesome. I counted myself a good linguist, having learned French at the knee of my startlingly unconventional grandmother and Latin and a smattering of modern Italian from my uncle Tristram. It seemed that these, along of course with English, were among the few European tongues that the girl opposite me did not know, the van der Eides’ interests evidently being in the north of Europe and not in the south. She spoke German, it seemed, even some Swedish, and was clearly competent in Spanish – inevitably, for a family that did so much trade in Spanish Flanders. But the only words of that tongue which I knew had been learned around camp fires from Don Alonso de Villasanchez, and consisted entirely of expressions so grossly anatomical and obscene that I dared not utter them in the presence of this seeming innocent.
Finally I resorted to the age-old expedient of trying to get her to learn my name.
‘Matthew,’ I said, repeating it and pointing to myself as vigorously as I could. ‘My name is Matthew.’
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Mah-too?’
‘Matthew! All one word!’
Then I remembered another of Tristram’s lessons: the history of the thirty years’ war, that had only barely ended when he first instructed me in it. ‘Of course, lad, much of it can be laid at the door of your namesake, the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias. That’s your name, in German. A hard T. If only he had been a harder Emperor.’
Once again I pointed at myself. ‘Matthias!’ I said, enunciating it very slowly: Matt-high-arse. I laughed at that, and she laughed delightedly along with me.
‘Matthias!’ she said, repeating it over to herself. ‘Matthias Kvin-tin. So.’
I pointed at her. ‘What – is – your – name?’
For the first time, she took my meaning at once.
‘Mijn naam is Cornelia,’ she said, and smiled sweetly.
Chapter Eleven
The storm had abated.
I was aware of the erstwhile Lord Protector’s rheumy old eyes upon me. As I returned his gaze, I could almost have sworn I saw the hint of tears in them. ‘My father was already dying,’ he said. ‘But the victory at the Dunes was one of the last things that rallied him. “God has not deserted us, Dick”, he told me. “Once again His divine providence has revealed itself in the cause of His righteous servants. Remember it, son, when you stand in my place”. And ten weeks later, there I stood – England’s ruler. But divine providence had intervened for my father so often, it had no measure left for Richard Cromwell.’
‘From what I saw of it, Master Cromwell, if God revealed himself for anyone that day, it was for the arms of France. For a Cardinal and his Catholic King. For the half-century of overweening French power that we have lived through since that day.’
Richard Cromwell looked away, then said quietly, ‘Perhaps my father was not so wrong, Matthew Quinton. France brought down the might of Spain, and now His Grace of Marlborough has brought down the might of France. All things in their time. But that which my father sought has come to pass, has it not? Britain bestrides Europe like a colossus, as he intended. Those who dissent from the established church have liberty of conscience, as he intended. Parliament now truly rules in England, as he intended.’ He smiled. ‘I thank God that I have lived long enough to see my father triumph from beyond the grave.’
Before I could respond to this brazen distortion of history, there was a knock upon the door. I turned and saw the face of young Barcock, my coachman, who informed me that he had scouted a little way along the road out of Cheshunt and believed it was fit to proceed. I nodded, dismissed him, and turned back to my strange dinner companion. By the time I did so, I knew full well that the words he had just spoken were no distortion at all: they were nought but the plain unvarnished truth. Truly England now was more a land of which Noll Cromwell would approve than one which would have found favour with either of my parents; or, indeed, with my younger self. The world had truly come full circle, and the ancient relic of history who sat before me was more in accord with the new times than was I, so many years his junior.
‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I shall leave you. My thanks for your good company and pleasant discourse. I bid you good day, Master Cromwell.’
I began to rise, but he lifted a hand to stay me. ‘Wait a while, Matthew Quinton,’ he said; and in that moment, there was about him a last glimmer of the forcefulness and commanding presence that still clung to the name of Cromwell, and to the office of Lord Protector. ‘Do you not wish to learn the true purpose of the letter you carried?’
Astonished, I settled back onto my stool. ‘The letter? You know something of it? Just one letter among thousands, so very long ago? But it was for my uncle, Tristram –’
‘Not so. Did not your brother tell you Tristram was but the last intermediary before its true recipient?’ Cromwell smiled. ‘It was for me, Quinton. Your uncle brought the letter to me. Humphrey Tennant was my alias in my secret correspondence with your king.’
I could barely register the words. This was beyond all comprehension. ‘The letter was for you?’
‘Indeed. The latest of several, but the most important by far – the one in which Charles Stuart outlined the terms he wished to offer me.’
‘Terms? To what end?’
‘The only end that mattered to him, and to you, I think. His restoration to the throne. The same to be engineered peaceably by myself within a year of my accession to the Protectorate. Your humble servant to be rewarded with a dukedom, the captain-generalcy of the army and ten thousand a year.’ The ancient creature eyed me wearily. ‘Exactly what he later gave my father’s lickspittle George Monck for handing him the crown upon a platter.’
I was speechless. But as I digested Cromwell’s words, I knew full well the truth of them. I remembered vividly the duplicitous, dissembling rogue that was His Late Majesty, King Charles the Second, and realised that then, in the desperate summer of 1658, he would have contentedly sold his soul to the devil if it got him back his throne; as, indeed, he sold it many times over in later years to ensure that he kept it.
‘Of course,’ said Cromwell, ‘I did not trust your uncle – no man ever did, as I recall.’ I nodded; even then, so many years after his unlikely end, I was no nearer fathoming the depths of the enigma that had been Doctor Tristram Quinton. ‘I feared that he might truly be an agent of my father, spinning an
elaborate web to test my loyalty. Or of my brother Henry, who wanted to be Lord Protector as desperately as I did not. Or of one of the generals of the army, Fleetwood, Lambert or any of them, each of whom believed they would be a better successor to my father than I. So I forced your uncle to agree to my terms. The king’s letter had to be brought to England by someone who would effectively be a hostage, and a guarantor for Tristram’s bona fides. A courier whose life would matter to him, and to Charles Stuart. A courier who would be duly arrested and placed under the power of the army. True, he would subsequently escape, but that would not be suspicious; incompetent or corruptible guards were then two a penny. But the letter itself would be sent up to London among the ordinary course of mail intercepted from royalist agents, so that if it was intercepted and deciphered by anyone other than Tristram, it would be easy for him and me to deny all knowledge of its contents. Charles Stuart offering me a dukedom, and sending the offer by means of a callow earl’s brother who got himself arrested almost as soon as he got off the boat? Who would see in that anything but utter desperation on the part of the malignant cavalier party, sending a laughable unsolicited missive to the Protector’s heir?’
My thoughts crowded in upon each other like a congregation thronging the aisles to hear a popular preacher. The notion that my brother, my uncle and my king had offered me up, unwitting, as part of a dark conspiracy to place Charles Stuart upon the throne by the grace of Richard Cromwell, was a profound shock. Yet in the midst of it all, one thing that Cromwell had said nagged at me.
‘You said there were several letters. You did not, then, reject the king’s overtures out of hand?’
The old head shook. ‘I did not wish to rule,’ he said. ‘I could see even then that holding together the army and the country after my father’s death might be an impossible task for any man, let alone for such an ordinary fellow as myself. And would not a dukedom and ten thousand a year –’ he waved toward the four walls of the room- ‘would they not have been better than this?’
‘Then why did you not accept the king’s offer?’
‘Precisely for the reason I have said. If holding the country together would be impossible for me, so it might prove for Charles Stuart, also. I knew I could never bring the army to agree to it, so I took my chances with them, the devil I knew, rather than with your king. And there was one other thing, at the end.’ He took a long draught, wiped his lips and stared at me steadily. ‘Could you ever have betrayed the name and legacy of your father, Matthew Quinton?’
I looked away; for I knew, as the Lord Protector knew, that I had spent my life living up to that name and legacy, and those of my father’s father.
The old man nodded. ‘So, then. Neither could I betray the name and legacy of mine, for I was born a Cromwell.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, perhaps I could have been a duke, warm and pampered in my palace as Marlborough now is. But remember, Matthew Quinton, I could have been so much more than that, too. If my father had taken the crown when it was offered him by Parliament the previous summer, I could have been your King to this very day.’ My face must have betrayed either astonishment or contempt. ‘Is it really so inconceivable, Matthew Quinton? In our lifetimes, England has accepted a whoremaster and a Dutch sodomite as her kings. Many worse, before that. Why not an honest Huntingdon yeoman, then? His Majesty, Richard the Fourth - think upon it. Fate plays tricks upon all men, my friend. But upon me, it has played a veritable carnival.’
A little afterwards, upon the road to Ware – and many times since, to this day – I have thought upon my encounter with that most singular of men, Richard Cromwell; or as he once was, His Highness the Lord Protector, the man who was very nearly king. He lived on for a few more months, a last survivor of a world that had forgotten him long before.
A fate that now is mine.
Ave, then, Your Highness; ave, Tom Clarabut, my Ranter friend; and ave, Aymer Vasey, Ned Mercer, Francis Kilvern, Dick Norris and Alonso de Villasanchez, you long-gone ghosts of the battle upon the Dunes. Grant them eternal rest, oh Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.
Historical and Author’s Notes
As Ensign Royal states, the Battle of the Dunes was fought on 14 June 1658 between the Spanish army of Don John, supported by a small British royalist army under the Duke of York, and the French army of Marshal Turenne, supported by a far larger contingent of Oliver Cromwell’s Ironsides. I have followed the historical accounts of the battle as closely as possible; for example, a small detachment of English troops was indeed sent to reinforce the Spanish upon the great sand hill by the sea, and the subsequent action – the very last time when Englishman fought Englishman during the British Civil Wars and Interregnum - unfolded essentially as I have described it here. The French victory, and the fall of Dunkirk which resulted from it, was one of the most important milestones in France’s development into the most powerful military force in Europe. In due course that status was challenged and undermined by the series of stunning victories won by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13). Dunkirk itself became a British colony, albeit only for four years before the restored King Charles II sold it to France. It is probably unlikely that many of those waiting to be evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940 realised that they were sheltering in the dunes where, three centuries before, two British armies had fought each other to the death; and to prove that history’s capacity to play tricks is as copious as Richard Cromwell said it was, before moving to the coast Don John’s army really did encamp around the town of Ypres, in the fields where so many descendants of both the royalist and roundhead armies would fall between 1914 and 1918. I have modified the chronology slightly to allow a longer interval between the army’s encampment at Ypres and its move to the coast.
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, died ten weeks after the Battle of the Dunes, on 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his great victories at Dunbar and Worcester. Just over a year earlier he had been offered the crown by Parliament in the document known as the Humble Petition and Advice. After weeks of agonising, Cromwell refused the title of king but accepted all other aspects of the Petition. These included both the form of address ‘Your Highness’ and the right to nominate his successor. In the months that followed it became increasingly apparent that this would be his eldest surviving son, Richard. The younger Cromwell duly succeeded as Lord Protector, but he lacked his father’s powerbase in the army, so his relationship with the generals became increasingly fractious. There is no record of him having received overtures from the Royalists; but then, it is in the nature of such transactions that records of them are exceedingly unlikely to have survived. What is certain is that two years later, Charles II made a series of very similar offers to leading figures in the army and navy that persuaded them to abandon the cause of the Commonwealth and embrace that of a restored monarchy. Richard Cromwell effectively resigned in April 1659 and spent most of the next twenty years abroad, living under a series of aliases, before finally returning to England in about 1680. By 1709-10, the period in which the first and last chapters are set, he was indeed living quietly at Cheshunt; he died on 12 July 1712.
Other historical ‘characters’ to appear in Ensign Royal are the great ship Naseby, the famous figurehead of which was also described by Evelyn and Pepys, and Elizabeth, Countess of Dysart, who managed to be simultaneously one of Oliver Cromwell’s closest friends and an active member of the secret Royalist organisation, the Sealed Knot. I have invented Tom Clarabut the Ranter. Some historians, notably J C Davis, have argued that the Ranters themselves were a chimera invented to frighten moderate people and give the government an excuse to clamp down on fringe political and religious groups; plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. I have preferred to adhere to the ‘party line’ that I absorbed during many History seminars through the 1980s and 1990s, namely that the Ranters were real, that they really did assume sin to be a false human construct, and t
hat they really did have wild bacchanalian orgies.
Finally, Ensign Royal is a prequel to ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’, a series of historical novels recounting Matthew’s adventures as an officer in the navy of King Charles II and Samuel Pepys. The titles in the series are:
In Gentleman Captain, the young Matthew Quinton narrowly escapes with his life from the shipwreck of his first command, a disaster caused partly by his ignorance of the sea. Unexpectedly granted a new ship by King Charles II, Quinton is entrusted with a delicate mission to put down rebellion in the western isles of Scotland, but discovers that treason is closer to home than he ever expected.
The Mountain of Gold sees Matthew ordered by the king to undertake a mission to West Africa to discover a mythical ‘mountain of gold’, the location of which is claimed to be known by a duplicitous Irish renegade from the Barbary Corsairs. With his family mired in the machinations of an alluring but dangerous courtesan, Matthew sets sail for the Gambia and becomes involved in a struggle to the death against a sinister and powerful opponent.
The Blast That Tears The Skies sees Matthew take an ancient, allegedly cursed ship and an unruly crew into action at the Battle of Lowestoft, the first battle of the Anglo-Dutch wars and one of the largest engagements in the sailing era. Meanwhile, and with London paralysed by the plague, some of those closest to Matthew are caught up in a mysterious conspiracy and the secret world of a shadowy spymaster. All of the book’s strands come together in a shattering climax when Matthew learns of a terrible secret in his own family’s history.
The Lion of Midnight takes Matthew to Sweden during the winter of 1665-6, a time when Britain is at war simultaneously with three of Europe’s greatest powers. Sweden itself is a hotbed of conspiracy, and Matthew is drawn into both a struggle for power and a battle against an old enemy which forces him to turn to two exceptionally unlikely and enigmatic allies. The book reaches its climax in a brutal engagement at sea.
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