The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

by Davies, J. D

  ‘Strike home, my lads! Steady your aim, Pascoe! Let the Dutch dogs shit your chainshot, boys! A hit, by God! Fine shooting, Penhaligon’s crew! Now, my brave Welsh boys, you’ll not let the Cornish outmatch you? Give fire!’

  Through the smoke I could sometimes spy the hulls and masts of the Dutch ships as their fleet passed along our line. Occasional glimpses of the flags at their jackstaffs and ensigns bore witness to the complexity of the Dutch state: here a ship of Flushing, there one of Hoorn or Harlingen; here a tricolour, there a nine-barred triple-prince ensign. All were intermingled, suggesting that their squadrons were in even greater disarray than ours. Many ships were past us before our gunners were able to lay in a bearing and open fire; when the smoke rolling along the line was particularly dense, some ships were by us before we even knew they were there. For one brief moment we exchanged broadsides with the Eendracht herself, Obdam’s flagship, but then she was gone into the smoke, her place taken by another. And so it went on for an hour or more, the captain of the Merhonour pacing his deck, waving his sword and shouting defiance and encouragement, until at last the entire Dutch fleet was past us.

  During the lull that followed I slumped against the starboard rail of the quarterdeck, greedily imbibed a bottle of small beer that young Barcock brought me, and rested a voice made hoarse by ceaseless shouting. Kit Farrell came on deck with Francis Gale, saluted, and reported the situation below decks. One man killed by a great splinter through his stomach – this on the starboard side, and so a consequence of the Guinea’s error – and three more wounded, with one more ruptured when he misjudged his grip on the rope he was hauling. I nodded; it was a minimal butcher’s bill, although it would not seem so to a newly and as yet unknowingly widowed young woman of Shadwell. Roger d’Andelys had been right, and the two fleets had been too far apart to inflict serious damage on each other. But there was surely worse to come. For now they were nearly clear of Lord Sandwich’s squadron in the rear, the Dutch would be able to tack back and thus regain the weather gage.

  Kit lifted his telescope to study the scene of battle. ‘Captain,’ he said suddenly, ‘look there, sir. The House of Nassau – I can barely believe it…’

  I took up my own eyepiece. There, just visible through occasional gaps in the swirling gunsmoke, was our old ship, now Beau Harris’s command. There was no apparent fault with the Nassau; her masts and rigging all stood, although there were a few shots through her sails, and she appeared to be answering her rudder. But there was something terribly, terribly wrong with Harris’s ship, and it must have been immediately apparent to every man in the English navy.

  Put simply, the House of Nassau was sailing in precisely the opposite direction to the rest of our fleet. She was sailing directly into the middle of the Dutch.

  ‘Why in Hell’s fires as he done that?’ cried Kit. ‘He must have ordered –’

  ‘Harris must have ordered the ship to tack,’ I said hoarsely, my voice still fragile. ‘Whether because he seeks a glorious immortality or because he does not actually know what a tack is, we might now never know.’

  And there, I thought, would have gone Matthew Quinton, but for the grace of God and the patience of Kit Farrell, so few years before.

  Kit was almost in tears. ‘He is a good man – Captain Harris. No seaman, and wilfully ignorant of the ways of a ship, but a good, decent soul.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said with a heavy heart, ‘a good man, and a good friend.’ I put my hand on my lieutenant’s shoulder. ‘Let us pray that even if he does not have the sense to steer the correct course, he has the sense to surrender before they blow him to oblivion.’

  The Dutch fleet swallowed the House of Nassau like a great seabeast devouring small fry. I saw the clouds of smoke and heard the blast of broadsides as she met her fate. As one, Kit, Roger and I raised our swords to attention in salute to Beaudesert Harris, captain of His Majesty’s Navy Royal; Francis Gale intoned a prayer; and I felt that emptiness which only the death of a friend before his time can bring.

  Roger d’Andelys, who if truth be told was even less of a seaman than Beau, suddenly pointed ahead. ‘Look, Matthew – your German prince is turning to starboard. What is he about, I wonder?’

  A confirmatory cry from our lookout reached me, and I took up my telescope. Rupert’s flagship, the Royal James, and the ships ahead of her, had evidently withdrawn their men from the guns and now had them about the yards, putting on more sail as though the devil pursued them. I swung around and trained my piece on the masts of the Royal Charles. There was no union flag at the mizzen; no order for the fleet to tack from the rear. And yet that, surely, was precisely what Rupert was doing.

  I looked toward the Royal Oak to see how Lawson would respond. But the Vice-Admiral remained resolutely set in his course, east by south. Rupert’s ships were now starting to come up on the opposite tack, all out of order and in no line of any sort.

  In desperation, I turned to Kit Farrell. ‘Kit, what in God’s name is happening?’

  My friend’s brow was furrowed. ‘Lawson has the right of it, since there is no signal,’ he said slowly. ‘But the prince has the right of it, too. Tacking from the rear is our only chance of preventing the Dutch weathering us.’

  The Royal James ploughed by us, a few hundred yards to starboard, the great plain white flag billowing out from her maintop. I could plainly see Rupert, Prince Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland and Bavaria, upon her quarterdeck, talking animatedly to his flagcaptain Kempthorne. Rupert the bold, whose impetuosity had killed my father. Rupert the truest cavalier, ever unconcerned with the orders – or absence of orders – from his superiors. Once again the prince had taken matters into his own hands and acted upon his initiative, just as he had so disastrously at Naseby.

  ‘Captain,’ said Kit, ‘if we of the Red do not turn and follow him, there will be a great gap in our fleet. Obdam will most certainly pour through it.’

  I looked in horror as the truth of Kit’s words became apparent upon water. The White was almost past us now, Myngs aboard Triumph even raising his hat to Lawson and myself as he passed. Yet still the Red did not turn – still our division did not turn, as it would have to do first according to the Duke of York’s fighting instructions and that document’s rigid insistence on how the line-of-battle was to be maintained. Why was there no signal from the flagship? If the danger was so evident that young Kit Farrell had noted it, then surely Penn and all the veteran seamen around the Duke had done so too?

  Then the most dreadful of thoughts came to me. What if this was the moment of treason? What if Lawson was deliberately leading the Red and Blue away, so that they would not be able to support Rupert? Yet surely that was impossible – he could not have foreseen the prince’s manoeuvre. But what if he had acted spontaneously upon this sudden and apparently heaven-sent opportunity to divide our fleet?

  The thoughts, and the dilemma, overwhelmed me. I went to the starboard rail and looked down into the waters. To tack, and follow Rupert – perhaps to be overwhelmed by the Dutch and killed by the folly of that prince, just as my father had been? Or to hold my course and fight Lawson if his treachery became apparent, thus to be killed either by English treason or by the Dutch annihilating our divided fleet?

  I thought of Cornelia, of my mother, of my poor brother, of Ravensden Abbey, of all I held dear. And at the last, there seemed to be another voice: Tack, boy.

  I turned from the rail and saw the expectation in the eyes of my companions upon the quarterdeck. Kit Farrell, Roger d’Andelys and Francis Gale stood there, my own three wise men. Yardley, the master, stood a little apart, but he, too, stared at me, awaiting my command.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Gentlemen, we will come about and follow the White. Mister Yardley, make it so, if you please.’

  For good or ill, once more a Quinton would follow Prince Rupert of the Rhine to death or glory.

  Now, Painter, reassume thy pencil’s care;

  It hath but skirmish’d yet, now fight pre
pare

  And draw the battle terribler to show

  Than the Last Judgment was of Angelo.

  ~ Andrew Marvell, Second Advice to a Painter

  Nowadays I am an object of antiquarian curiosity, somewhat akin to Stonehenge or Hadrian’s Wall. Children goggle at me in the street. Fresh-faced young sea-officers seek me out, or are told to seek me out, to hear my tales of nearly mythical battles long ago and of the legends with whom I served – Rupert, Holmes, Lawson, all the rest of them. Yet these young men look at me with disbelief when I recount the story of this battle of Lowestoft. A captain acting on his own initiative, rather than waiting for the signal, rather than holding his place in the line? At that, they give me glances that must resemble those cast toward heretics at the stake by the men entrusted with lighting the faggots. For now obedience to the Fighting Instructions is all, and ‘risk’ and ‘initiative’ are words as abominable to the average sea-officer as ‘court-martial’ and ‘marriage’. I said as much some months ago to my old rival and neighbour Torrington’s boy, insufferably proud at having been made a post-captain at twenty-three (but such wonders are manifold when one’s father is First Lord of the Admiralty). He listened gravely, for he is a serious youth, but I doubt that he absorbed the lesson. Still, perhaps after my time young Johnnie Byng will make a decent enough officer, as long as no-one thinks fit to put such a heavy insipid in command of a fighting fleet.

  * * *

  Having made the fateful decision to tack and follow Rupert, I realised at once that I needed to justify myself to my Lord Admiral. For now I was disobeying his orders twice over: I was falling out of my allotted place in the line without either his order or that of my divisional commander, Sir John Lawson; and, perhaps worse, I was abandoning my injunction to stay in Lawson’s wake in case he truly intended to go over to the Dutch side. Yet to me, in that dire moment, the very real threat of Lord Obdam and his mighty fleet, glimpsed from time to time through gaps in our own confused formation, was far more immediate than any hypothetical prospect of a defection by the Commonwealths-men. Surely if they had meant to change sides, they would have done so already, not after they must have lost men to Dutch shot? This was my reasoning, although a dark doubt remained upon my heart.

  I called for pen, ink and paper, and to my surprise found that those materials were supplied by Cherry Cheeks Russell, who brought them to me with a strange look of exultation on his young face. I rested the paper on top of one of the quarterdeck sakers and hastily scribbled a note to His Royal Highness.

  The only way I could communicate such a confidential message to the Duke of York was by sending either Bachelor’s Delight or a boat over to the Royal Charles, but that would be a remarkably dangerous mission. True, there was a lull in the firing – the Dutch were still completing their own tack from the north-west, and the sound of gunfire between them and the rear division of the Blue had been gradually diminishing as the two fleets drew apart. But any craft attempting to steer from the Merhonour to the Royal Charles would face the prospect of being run down by almost the whole of the Red squadron as it still beat south-eastward, following Lawson and the Royal Oak. After some contemplation, I decided that the Delight was too valuable to be risked in such work; she might be needed later in the fight, perhaps, in extremis, as the salvation of men abandoning a sinking ship.

  ‘I need a boat’s crew,’ I cried, ‘and a volunteer to carry my despatch to the duke aboard the Royal Charles!’

  Julian Carvell, the laconic Virginian, volunteered at once to lead the crew, and alongside him stood Polzeath, Ali Reis and Macferran. Four of my most loyal followers; it would be dire indeed if the boat perished, yet I knew I needed a strong, competent crew to undertake such a perilous mission, and these men were undoubtedly some of the best under my command. But that still left the question of who could be spared to bear the message and deliver it into the duke’s own hand upon his quarterdeck.

  Roger d’Andelys stepped forward. ‘I will take your despatch, Captain,’ he said formally. ‘A gentle row upon the waters will be most beneficial to my constitution.’

  I bowed my head. Roger might play the French fop, but there was no doubting the bravery of this man who had once saved my life upon a Scottish moor. ‘I thank you, My Lord, but it will be mightily dangerous work, unfit for a man of your rank – and who knows how I might yet require the services of the former captain of the Most Christian King’s ship Le Téméraire in this engagement?’

  ‘I will carry the message, Captain,’ said Francis, ‘for if God will not protect me, I fear there is little hope for any other.’

  ‘Well said, Francis,’ I said, ‘but I think you will soon have ample business aboard this ship. I fear, old friend, that we will need both your prayers and your sword in the hours to come. And do you think my brother and mother would forgive me if I lost the vicar of Ravensden, so forcing them to present another?’

  Cherry Cheeks Russell stepped forward eagerly. ‘I’ll go, Captain. I can swim – my cousins have thrown me in the lake at Woburn often enough for me to learn how to get out of it without drowning. Don’t matter if I get killed, neither. There’ll still be enough sots and enough Russells in the world.’

  This was unexpected; I had not marked down young Russell as either a hero or a suicide. I half suspected that his intervention might have been brought on by Dutch courage, but the more I thought upon it, the more sense it made. My officers were either too good to be spared or too incompetent to be trusted. On the other hand, Cherry Cheeks had the social rank to be a fitting emissary to the heir to the throne, and if he perished under fire, well, then: as he himself had concluded, he was expendable.

  The boy deserved a reward, I thought, but what could I possibly give him? Then it occurred to me. I smiled, and swiftly added a postscript to the letter he was to bear to the Lord High Admiral.

  As the boat’s crew made ready, there was a shout from our lookout at the mainmast head. ‘Captain!’ Kit cried. ‘Look, sir! Look at the Charles!’

  I snatched my own eyepiece and levelled at the fleet flagship. There, at the mizzen, flew the Union Flag. The courses of the great ship were loose. She was tacking, and she was ordering the rest of the fleet to tack. Ordering it to follow Rupert and the Merhonour.

  ‘My congratulations, Lieutenant Farrell,’ I said formally. ‘It seems you divined the situation correctly.’

  He grinned. ‘If the Blue and the centre and rear of the Red tack smartly enough, there should be no gap between us and the White. We will yet beat the Dutch, Captain Quinton.’

  ‘Amen to that! And with no need to adhere to our position in the line, merely to keep the fleet together, I think there is only one proper station for this ship. Mister Yardley, there! You will steer to fall in astern of the Royal Charles, if you please!’

  * * *

  What none of us knew then was that the confusion over the order to tack was caused by one of those moments of chance and low farce that so often determine the outcome of human affairs. The Duke of York had actually given the verbal order exactly when he should have done, when it first became clear what Obdam was about; but the sailor sent aloft to break out the Union at the mizzen took so long over it that most of the Dutch fleet had completed their turn before the signal was hoisted. Thus but for the quick thinking of Prince Rupert, our fleet and the very future of England might have been doomed by the clumsy fingers of one poor wretch.

  As it was, my immediate concern was with the safety of young Russell and my boat’s crew. In one sense, the flagship’s turn made their task easier, giving them more time to complete their voyage – for after all, the Royal Charles would no longer pass by us so rapidly on the opposite tack. On the other hand, the manoeuvring and positions of the intermediate ships was now even less predictable than they had been. My Lord Marlborough’s Old James, almost as old and cumbersome as the Merhonour, slewed around awkwardly and almost ran them down; as it was, the boat could not avoid her wake and pitched dreadfully, so much so that I
thought it would inevitably be overturned by the next wave. Through my telescope, I could see Russell clinging onto the wales for dear life. Yet the boat held its course, and I reflected that Polzeath had probably ridden out far worse conditions while fishing off his native Cornwall, Macferran in the waters of the Hebrides and Ali Reis in the Middle Sea. As for Carvell, who unlike the others was not born to the sea, he had an apparently maniacal disregard for his own safety that seemed almost to guarantee his survival. Thus the boat completed its little voyage, and I almost cheered out loud when it secured to the larboard side of the Royal Charles.

  Cherry Cheeks Russell later told me that he had found His Royal Highness upon the quarterdeck. The heir to England was in martial attire, clad in half armour and wearing a great broad-brimmed hat; but when he took it off to wipe his brow, Russell said, it was apparent that the hat concealed an iron skull-cap. The Duke was in the midst of a little court of his own, standing next to Sir William Coventry and Charlie Berkeley, Earl of Falmouth. Nearby were Lord Muskerry, a Mister Boyle who was a son to the Earl of Cork, and the obnoxious Harry Brouncker, my good-sister’s stud. Incongruously, York’s little dog was running about the quarterdeck, as content as if it was chasing a bitch in St James’s Park. The Duke of Monmouth stood apart, listening to and occasionally laughing at the merry banter of the courtiers, but maintaining his wonted air of regal detachment.