The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  We toasted His Majesty. Given Beau’s evidently bibulous mood, a succession of other toasts were bound to follow in short order, so I knew I would have precious little opportunity to transact the business that had to be resolved.

  I said, ‘I make one request of you, Beau. Once I have a new command – if, indeed, that is what I am to have – I would be grateful if you would release my own following. I will solicit directly for the services of Master Farrell.’

  Harris waved a hand. ‘Of course, Matt. As long as I receive a sufficient draft of new men once the press warrants are issued, you can have as many of your men as you wish.’

  ‘Kit Farrell is a good fellow, Beau. Depend on him, for as long as you have him. Why, he could teach you more of the sea-craft, as he has with me –’

  Beau laughed. ‘Oh, Matthew Quinton, how many times have we had that argument? You, my friend, have been seduced by this strange notion that captains of king’s ships must somehow know all the arts of the rude tarpaulin. As I have told you many times, that is not fitting for men of our rank. We command by our birth and our example, sir – birth and example. The mechanic craft of steering the ship should be left to those of the lower orders who are born to it.’ I sighed inwardly; I should have known better than to give Harris an opportunity to indulge his prejudices. Harris, whose grandfather had been a butcher when mine had been an earl.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Alas, Matt,’ Beau continued, ‘for all the undoubted rightness of my case, I feel myself out of step with the times. The tarpaulin rules all and the gentleman is cast down, in the navy as in the state.’ He finished his glass and poured another large measure. ‘You’ve not heard the news that almost all the old fanatic captains of Oliver’s day are granted commissions? “Oh,” says Monck, our proud Duke of Albemarle, abetted by those time-servers Penn and Lawson, “these are the men who cleared the seas of the Dutch under our commands twelve years past. Recall them, Your Majesty, and we will vouch for their loyalty!” And our sovereign lord and his noble brother, believing they can reconcile cavalier with roundhead and make us all forget the differences of a quarter-century, are so seduced by the prospect of crushing the Dutch that they ignore the danger. The cavaliers like you and I, whom they have promoted these last four years, are no longer thought good enough, so the turd-chewing rebels emerge from their hiding places and strut quarterdecks again. All this, and yet fanatic plots are reported every day, the dissenters from the True Church grow unchecked, and suspicion stalks the land like a midnight hag. We are embarking upon a great war, and yet dissension eats away at us from within, like a canker. Is this what we endured exile for, Matt? Is this what our fathers fought or died for? Great God in Heaven, is this the England we expected to inherit when our king came back?’

  ‘But –’

  Once into his cups, Beau Harris was a mightily difficult man to contradict (and his father had not fought or died in the war, unlike mine; instead, he had made a healthy profit out of selling munitions to both sides). And once so very, very deep into his cups, he was also mightily difficult to stop.

  ‘There are stout cavaliers galore in the realm, Matt, who could command a king’s ship. Yes, put good sailing masters under them, men like your friend Farrell, but let them display the innate courage and judgement that is their birthright! ’Tis said at court that His Grace of Buckingham and My Lord Arlington urge such a course upon His Majesty at every opportunity, but thus far they are stymied – presumably by that coxcomb Clarendon, for I cannot believe such vacillation is His Majesty’s intent.’ I, who knew Charles Stuart rather better than Beau, had a somewhat different perspective upon the matter, but kept my counsel. ‘Yet if we have mere tarpaulins in command we risk the security of the realm, let alone making ourselves no better than the Dutch.’

  I did not venture the thought that those same mere tarpaulins seemed to have done well enough against the Dutch in the previous war, and that a smattering of men with the experience of winning might not be amiss in the conflict to come.

  After an hour or two of such discourse – or rather, of Beau’s ceaseless diatribe – I knew the time had come to take my leave. Beau was not insistent upon it; far from it. Evening was falling, and he had offered me one last night in my cabin and my sea-bed. But a ship cannot have two captains, and in my mind, I had already put the House of Nassau behind me. I bade a brief farewell to Kit Farrell, upon whom the effective responsibility for the ship now devolved; Kit merely smiled, for he knew full well the deficiencies of Beau Harris and my ignorant young lieutenant, Pomeroy, and was more than capable of allowing them the trappings of command while exercising the real authority himself.

  ‘Perchance we shall sail together again before very long, Captain Quinton,’ he said as we parted.

  ‘I have no doubt of it, Mister Farrell,’ I said cheerily, although in my heart I had doubt aplenty. A captain without a ship is like an actor without work. Sooner or later the audience discovers a new favourite, and the old one finds it ever more difficult to procure himself a proper role.

  My chests were packed by my servants, for I now had my own little entourage of cabin boys: Richard Barcock, part of the endless family of the steward of Ravensden Abbey; Edward Castle, son of a lieutenant of mine in two previous commissions, who had perished during my voyage to the Gambia the previous summer; and Tom Scobey, some sort of cousin to Lanherne. They were all crestfallen, for they knew full well that their employment ended with mine.

  I was rowed ashore and took a room at the Salutation, in the shadow of the castle. As the boat drew close to Dover beach, I turned and looked out at my former command, her stern lanterns lit, swinging at single anchor. Other lanterns marked the positions of the prizes, scattered around that exposed harbour. I had an uneasy feeling that I was looking upon the end of the easy war; for good or ill, the real business was about to begin.

  Make Heav’n concerned and an unusual star

  Declare the importance of th’ approaching war.

  ~ Edmund Waller, Instructions to a Painter

  New fashions in houses, new fashions at table,

  Old servants discharged and the new not so able,

  And all good custom is now but a fable,

  And is not old England grown new?

  ~ Anon., Old England Grown New

  (popular song of the 1660s)

  All war is obscene.

  Well, that is what the hedge-preachers proclaim; and usually, I would be the first to reject such womanish ranting. After all, war has been very good to me over the years. Very good indeed, if truth be told. But if we humour the hedge-preachers a while, then the actual means of declaring a war becomes a double obscenity: blood and slaughter dressed up as pomp and theatre. I have witnessed it many times, now – a man approaching his ninetieth year has witnessed wars enough to rival the entire Old Testament. No doubt it is a consequence of my English birth, for during my inordinately long life my dear land has been war’s earthly paradise. We have fought the French. We have fought the Spanish. We have fought the Dutch. Dear God, I am so very old that I can even remember when we fought each other. One of my earliest memories is of a parliamentary dragoon being hacked to pieces in our herb garden, a somewhat unfortunate sight for a five-year-old to behold. That was in the year forty-five, at the height of the great civil war, when King Charles the Martyr’s army suddenly and unaccountably decided that the obvious way of staving off its imminent defeat was to launch an invasion of my innocuous home county of Bedfordshire.

  However, the first time I witnessed a formal declaration of war was in the year 1665. That twelvemonth began with a fiery comet blazing across our Britannic skies, heralding all kinds of portents to come; or so it was said. Men whispered anxiously of great revolutions in the state, of dreadful wars, of the death of kings. But none foresaw the dark horror in the land that the comet truly foretold, and Captain Matthew Quinton, riding toward the Holbein gate of Whitehall Palace, certainly did not foresee the very personal horrors that would af
flict him before the year was out. It was a cold March day, and I had ridden post-haste from Dover after relinquishing my command of the House of Nassau to Beau Harris. I was on my way toward a hoped-for interview with the Lord Admiral’s secretary, Sir William Coventry, from whom I might learn the true reason for my removal from command and from whom – God willing – I might solicit another. At that moment, out of the gate of Scotland Yard came Garter King of Arms and Clarencieux, accompanied by the serjeants-at-arms, all in the tabards of ancient times. Trumpets blew, drums beat. The many drunks and Bedlam-men in the throng were hushed, or else beaten into silence. Garter unfurled a sumptuous parchment and read aloud the reasons that had induced his Most High and Puissant Majesty King Charles the Second to declare war upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

  Wars are devious and ravenous beasts: they begin and end with lies, and between times they lap the blood of young men. Indeed, the beginning of this second Dutch war was marked by a remarkably brazen set of lies, even by the standards of those times. The Dutch were manifestly the aggressors, Garter proclaimed, and His Majesty was merely acting in defence of his just rights. (In the Dutch counter-declaration, of course, we were manifestly the aggressors, and they were merely acting in defence of their just rights; which is ever one of the curious things about wars.) De Ruyter was spoiling our ships, and great were the complaints of the East India and West India Companies. Putting aside the rightness of a King of England admitting in public that he was making war at the behest of a gaggle of avaricious merchants, it seemed to me that the Dutch had better cause for complaining of the depredations we had visited upon them, for we had certainly commenced them first; I knew that better than any other man in Whitehall that day, for I had carried out some of those very depredations only the year before.

  As Garter concluded his peroration and rolled the parchment, a great cheer went up. The ale-sellers caught the mood, as ale-sellers invariably do, and began to out-vie each other in offering cheap drink with which to toast the new war. The mob toasted the king, the queen and the Duke of York, cried damnation to the Dutch and began lustfully but tunelessly to sing the old songs of English pride and defiance. I even recognised a verse or two of ‘Lord Ravensden’s Lament’, that hoary old panegyric to my grandfather. Yet for all the enthusiasm and royalist fervour, a few dissenting voices could be heard above the throng – even there, in the very seat of royal power. Shouts or snatches of angry conversation, swiftly cried down or pummelled into silence, but there nonetheless:

  ‘God bless the Dutch, who will bring us deliverance from Charles Stuart and all his whores!’

  ‘The comet brings judgement upon the wickedness of a debauched court…’

  ‘Oh for Cromwell, who knew how to wage war better than these cavalier popinjays!’

  Thus, and despite all its bitter divisions, England was at war. Yet there was I, a captain of the king’s navy, now with no command in this war against our heinous enemy. For me, indeed, it was a war on two fronts, for there was also the ongoing and as yet indecisive campaign being waged against my brother’s new wife, a suspected murderess and undoubted French agent. This unexpected matrimony (for the earl was never much inclined to the female sex) was ostensibly to provide the heir to Ravensden that Cornelia and I seemed incapable of conceiving after seven years of marriage; but it had ultimately transpired that this heir was to be sired upon the new Countess Louise by the sovereign lord of virility, King Charles. Thus as I rode into the stable yard by the tennis court of Whitehall Palace, my mind was filled with troubles and ambivalence. I recalled the last time I had been in the palace, the previous summer, when before the king and my brother Lord Ravensden, I had denounced my sister-in-law the Countess Louise as a lackey of King Louis.

  ‘God’s fish, Matt,’ the king had replied cheerfully, ‘if I arrested everyone in England who takes French bribes, I’d have to make the entire country a prison!’

  Of course, I did not know then that Charles Stuart would also have had to arrest himself. As it was, my anger had been exacerbated by a recent perilous (and, as it transpired, utterly pointless) voyage conducted at this king’s behest, and not even the presence of Majesty could restrain my rage any longer.

  ‘Sir, King Louis knows full well that you have bedded her to give my brother an heir, that our line may continue!’ Because I cannot father children upon my wife. ‘Your Majesty, the French king has wheedled her into your bed by way of my brother’s, the better to spy upon you!’

  My brother Charles glared at me. The king’s change of mood was even more terrifying. He drew himself up. His long, ugly face tightened into a mask. Instinctively, I dropped to my knee in genuflection. ‘Majesty,’ I gasped, ‘I – I beg Your Majesty’s pardon –’

  ‘Never,’ hissed Charles Stuart, ‘never demean Caesar in his presence, Matthew Quinton.’

  With that, the King of England turned on his heel, leaving me to bow my way backwards out of the chamber, facing the royal rump. My brother looked upon me with contempt and stayed at the side of the king, his friend. I had seen neither of them since that day. I knew not how I had been granted the command of the House of Nassau, but I was certain that it had not been at the behest of my monarch.

  I strode across the Privy Garden and then through the endless passages and chambers of the rambling palace of Whitehall, making my way without interruption to a door in the southernmost part of the palace, near to the river and the bowling green. I knocked, entered – and unexpectedly beheld one of the many marvels of that precocious time.

  The small oak-panelled room was dominated by a vast circular desk, which comprised a multitude of draws, shelves and boxes. At the centre of it, upon a rotating chair, sat a sharp-looking man of my brother’s age, sporting a large but unfashionably light-hued periwig that matched his yellow eyebrows.

  Sir William Coventry, secretary to the Duke of York and commissioner of the navy, looked up and spread his hands theatrically.

  ‘Captain Quinton. What think you of my new assistant?’

  ‘I – Sir William, I have truly never seen the like.’

  ‘Indeed not. I believe it is unique in England, sir, if not in the world. Of my own devising, you see,’ he said with inordinate delight. ‘What is the greatest enemy to the efficient conduct of business in any part of government, Captain Quinton? Paper, sir. The mountain of paper that swamps me day after day in the conduct of the Admiralty. Yet this simple desk permits me to file every piece of paper in a fitting place, where I can retrieve it instantly. Behold’ – he reached over and opened a drawer – ‘your letters to me, during your command of the House of Nassau. And here’ – without warning, Coventry span on his chair and reached into a box on the far side of the desk – ‘the last muster book of the same, sent in by Captain Harris. With, it has to be said, rather more errors than was the case during your command.’ Coventry span back to face me. I did not know whether to gasp, laugh or seek a physician who could clap him up. ‘Efficiency, sir,’ he said. ‘That is what I strive for. Oh, my foes mock my desk behind my back, but this is the future, Captain Quinton. Information – control of it, access to it. He who possesses information in these new, rational times will be a master amongst men.’

  ‘As you say, Sir William.’

  The Lord High Admiral’s secretary continued to look mightily pleased with himself. I wondered if there were any left at court who had not been treated to a demonstration of the marvellous desk. The odd scullion, perhaps, or maybe a chimney-sweep, but surely no one grander than that. ‘So, Captain,’ said Coventry. ‘You seek me upon business?’

  ‘Sir – my removal from the House of Nassau – I wondered upon the cause of it. I hope for a new commission, now that war is declared and the fleet is already assembling at the Nore.’

  Coventry leaned back. The rotating chair creaked ominously under his weight.

  ‘Captain Quinton, I am but a secretary.’ This was disingenuous; Coventry was spoken of as one of the rising politicians of the realm, ke
eper of all the secrets of the heir to the throne and many others besides. ‘His Royal Highness does not make me privy to all his thoughts, and he did not share with me his reasons for recalling you from your previous command. Nor did he leave any instructions for the issue of a new commission to you before he left to take command of the fleet – for which I leave tonight, to attend upon His Royal Highness.’

  ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I am most desirous of another command –’

  ‘With respect, Captain Quinton, so are the three score and more of candidates for command who pester me relentlessly. And of course, the decision by His Majesty and His Royal Highness to recommission many veterans of the last war with the Dutch has greatly restricted the opportunities available to those who have no such experience.’ Coventry’s tone was curious; it was difficult to tell whether he approved or disapproved of the recall of the men whom Beau Harris had denigrated so ferociously. ‘But you may be assured, sir, that I will lay your name before His Royal Highness. As I would with the names of all other solicitants for command.’

  Coventry’s words were damning. They cut me to the very quick. I cannot remember taking my leave of him and his ludicrous desk. I dimly recall wandering through the maze of Whitehall, getting lost more than once, consumed by my own desperate thoughts. Nothing could make a young sea-captain’s name and fortune like a good war, and yet here I was, destined apparently to take no part in this one. Victory, glory, honour, riches – none of it bound for Matthew Quinton. And as the black mood wrapped its tentacles around me, one thought above all turned over in my mind.

  How was I to tell my wife?

  * * *

  Since our return to England upon the king’s restoration, Cornelia and I had lived at Ravensden Abbey, the ancestral home of the Quintons in Bedfordshire. This was chiefly of necessity, for I lacked the income to permit the establishment of an independent household. During the last year, though, the arrangement had become increasingly untenable. The relationship between Cornelia and my mother, the Dowager Countess, had ever been, at best, as close as that of mutually suspicious cats, one old and ferociously territorial, the other young and impertinent. The difference in opinion between ourselves and my mother over the matter of my brother’s marriage to the enigmatic Louise, sometime Lady De Vaux and now Countess of Ravensden, had created a final and apparently irreparable rift. Mother was seemingly convinced that the lady in question would be able to provide an heir to continue our bloodline, a feat that Cornelia and I seemed wholly incapable of achieving; a brutal truth that brought forth many tears at midnight in our bedroom. My wife, in turn, had been convinced that the Lady Louise was the murderer of her first two husbands and had for good measure done away with the daughter she had borne to the first. Thus affairs had stood before we learned that the marriage had been arranged so that the heir to Ravensden could be fathered upon Lady Louise by the King of England himself, thereby repaying some old and unspecified debt to our family. To say that this revelation had not improved Cornelia’s mood is perhaps the grossest understatement I shall record in these journals.