The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012)

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The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) Page 26

by Davies, J. D


  I laughed. ‘All the proud lawyers of the Inns of Court should be grateful you will never enter their profession, Carvell.’

  But the men around Carvell were less patient and less witty. They growled with longing to be in battle, some no doubt to bring victory to England, some in hope of prize money, some in the knowledge that a swift end to the war would release them from this floating hell into which they had been thrust unwillingly. Impotent to expedite their ambitions, I retreated once more to the quarterdeck. Kit Farrell had his telescope trained upon the distant Royal Oak, perhaps three miles to the east of us and only barely visible through occasional gaps in the smoke and the tangle of increasingly shattered men-of-war. ‘Look there, Captain. Lawson is luffing out of the line.’

  The old thought of treason crossed my mind again, but even my first cursory look at the Oak suggested that nothing could be further from the truth. The great ship was desperately damaged, with much of her rigging shot to pieces and her sails torn. But the same was true of many other ships along the line to leeward of us. Jordan’s St George, now occupying our old place roughly astern of the Royal Oak, seemed in a far worse state than her flagship, yet still she held her position, firing intermittently into the Dutchman opposite her. Something was evidently badly wrong aboard Lawson’s command, and word of it came to us soon enough. We saw the Royal Oak’s ketch put on sail and weave dexterously through the wreckage and open water that lay between her and our force away to windward. As she passed under her quarter I saw one of her master’s mates, whom I recognised from my previous visits to his ship.

  ‘Royal Oaks, there!’ I cried. ‘What’s afoot? How fares it with Sir John?’

  The mate almost spat his answer at me. ‘Shot through the knee and too hurt to command,’ he bawled. ‘The master dead, the ship in confusion. It might not have been thus if you had kept station, Merhonour!’

  I felt the words as a blade in the ribs: surely the man only spoke truth? For my impetuosity in following Prince Rupert into the first tack, a good man – nay, a great man – was perhaps like to lose his life, and the finest new ship in our fleet was maimed so badly that she had to fall out of the fight.

  The Royal Oak’s boat avoided us in its return voyage, and I only learned later of the message it bore: Jordan of the St George to relieve Lawson in command, and thus hopefully to oversee the hasty running repairs of the newer and more potent ship and bring her back into the battle.

  Now it was near two, and the issue of the day was in the balance. From our frustrating distance we could plainly see three or four great Dutch ships surrounding Sandwich’s Royal Prince, endeavouring to hammer that mighty old hull. Sandwich’s second, the Montagu, came up to her relief but was immediately attacked by the vast Indiaman that I recognised at once as the Oranje, the ship that had exchanged broadsides with us so recently. My good-brother seemed deliberately to drive his command into the Montagu; even amidst the thunderous crescendo of incessant broadsides, we could clearly hear the impact of timber upon timber as the hulls struck. Through my telescope, I watched Cornelis’s men swarm over the gunwales and onto the upper deck of the Montagu. It was the Dutch way: charge and board. If they could evade our devastating broadsides and come to close action, as he was doing, the day might yet belong to the Netherlanders.

  ‘Damnation,’ I cried, ‘the fight will be lost, and yet we still lie here like neuters – what in God’s name is that perfidious rebel Penn thinking?’

  My answer came at once, fortunately negating my petulant and indiscreet outburst. It took the form of a blue flag breaking out at the mizzen topmast of the Royal Charles. It was the signal for the centre and rear divisions of the Red, together with the one stray from the van, to fall down into the melée.

  * * *

  Upon the Royal Charles, young Cherry Cheeks Russell, who recounted the tale to me after the battle, heard the Duke of York order his ships into the heart of the fight. Penn had been for intervening earlier, Russell said, but the courtiers around the Duke, Harry Brouncker the most vocal of them, had urged delay. Surely, Brouncker argued, English arms were so superior to Dutch that the Blue and White alone could defeat the enemy? Surely there was no need to place in harm’s way the precious life of the heir to the throne? James Stuart was known to be no coward, but such arguments must have weighed heavily upon him. At last, though, the Lord High Admiral reached his decision, much to Brouncker’s apparent dismay, and the fresh ships of the Red fell down against the Dutch. Alas, some did so more swiftly than others. As ever, and despite bearing up her helm and hoisting studding sails, the sluggish Merhonour wallowed in the wake of the faster ships (that is, all of them), thus causing her captain to resume his irate pacing of his quarterdeck. Meanwhile, Lord Marlborough’s Old James made directly for the relief of the Montagu, forcing the Oranje to withdraw her boarders and to haul away. Cheered by the arrival of the relieving ships, the Blue and White squadrons fell down with the wind to launch headlong attacks against the main body of the Dutch fleet. Almost six hours of relentless bombardment had clearly taken its toll of the smaller, lighter enemy ships; even young Russell, so ignorant of the ways of war, could see clearly that some of the Dutch were starting to give way before the onslaught.

  The Charles herself made directly for the unmistakeable shape of the Eendracht, a long, slender two-decker flying at the maintop the torn but still easily recognisable command flag of Lord Obdam. The Duke of York remained upon his quarterdeck attended by his dog and the little court of Falmouth, Muskerry and Boyle, who laughed easily about the sport they were about to have with the Dutch admiral. Brouncker, unduly affronted by the rejection of his advice (or so it seemed to Russell), had moved away to brood at the larboard rail. Penn sat a little way off upon his chair, in conference with Sir William Coventry; the lookouts, high in the tops of the Royal Charles, reported that Obdam was in identical condition to our Great Captain Commander, wracked by gout and seated upon his quarterdeck. The young Duke of Monmouth was further aft upon the starboard rail, earnestly questioning Harman about the progress of the battle.

  The two great ships came together, larboard of Charles against starboard of Eendracht, and their batteries roared out thunderously. Musket fire from the tops raked the decks. Russell looked upon the sight with wonder and turned to make a remark to young Boyle, with whom he had struck up a sort of fellowship in the brief hours that he had been aboard. But as Russell turned, the cannon roared again. He heard a sudden hiss and felt a rush of air pass his ear, bearing something upon it. He felt something strike his face. He looked up, and saw the strangest of sights. The three courtiers, Boyle, Falmouth and Muskerry, still stood there, still stood for the briefest of moments, but they no longer had their heads. Blood spurted from the torso of what until moments before had been the rising royal favourite, Charles Berkeley, Earl of Falmouth. As the three corpses fell to the deck, Russell turned to look at the Duke, whose hat had been blown off, but whose head otherwise remained firmly upon his shoulders. A head and shoulders that were now covered in the blood and brains of his dead friends.

  Cherry Cheeks wiped a hand across his face, and as he later said to me, he realised that my nickname for him was more true than ever it was; for he, too, was bathed in the blood of the freshly slaughtered.

  The veteran seamen looked upon the scene and retched. Brouncker, the one survivor of the courtiers, vomited long and hard over the larboard rail. Yet James Stuart and young Edward Russell somehow remained serene, looking steadily at each other. The Duke calmly pulled what appeared to be a shard of plate china from a deep cut on his left hand, then took a kerchief from his sleeve and wrapped it round the bleeding wound. It was only when James lifted the shard to inspect it that Russell, and presumably the duke too, realised it must have been part of the skull of one of the dead courtiers.

  Russell glanced across at the Duke of Monmouth, standing unscathed on the other side of the quarterdeck. For a moment, just one moment, he could have sworn that the young man’s expression twiste
d into a scowl of disappointment. Then Monmouth rushed solicitously to his uncle’s side and assisted him with bandaging his wounded hand.

  The Duke of York nodded grimly towards Monmouth and Russell in turn and said, ‘The Lord is truly my strength and my shield. Let us give thanks unto Him, for he has preserved us for greater work to come. He has preserved me.’

  And so He had. The gun crew who fired the fatal shot from the Eendracht would never know that if they had aimed just a fraction of a degree differently, they would certainly have changed the entire course of British history: for by not dying that day aboard the Royal Charles, James, Duke of York, lived to become His Majesty King James the Second of England, the Seventh of Scots, only to be hounded out of his offended realms within a few dozen months. His son and little grandsons still fester in a palace in Rome, now but feeble pretenders praying every day to reassert the destiny that seemed to have triumphed so manifestly on that third day of June in the year sixty-five.

  Perhaps James Stuart foresaw his eventual accession; after all, such dreams and nightmares form the lot of an heir, as I know full well. Perhaps he even daydreamed that one day, he and Monmouth might battle each other for the crowns of Britain, and that the one would order the beheading of the other. But James of York certainly could not have foreseen the consequences for him of God’s equally fortuitous decision to spare the lives of Harry Brouncker and Cherry Cheeks Russell.

  * * *

  The cumbersome old Merhonour had lost headway upon the Royal Charles as the great ships fell down into the battle. At last, though, we were bearing down upon our own target, a fifty-gun flagship of the Maas admiralty with her mizzen shot away and the mainyard in ruins.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘If we hold this course, we can come across his stern and rake him. A fine prize, gentlemen.’

  Roger d’Andelys nodded happily, and even the gloomy Giffard grunted in approbation. But Kit Farrell’s telescope remained fixed on the Dutchman.

  ‘Bear away, Captain,’ he said urgently. ‘Bear away now.’

  ‘Why, in Heaven’s name? We have him, Lieutenant –’

  Kit pointed toward the bow of a small ship, emerging from the lee side of the Dutchman that had sheltered her. ‘Fireship,’ he said simply.

  I gave the orders, but sensed that I did not need to: men were already on their way up the shrouds and the helmsman below must have already put over the ship’s unresponsive whipstaff, for our bow began to turn away from the oncoming threat almost at once.

  The fireship was a converted fly-boat, the only sign of her deadly function being the enlarged sally-port abaft that would allow her crew to escape into the boat secured beneath it. Apart from this, she appeared but an innocent merchantman; yet her main deck would have been converted into a fire-room filled to the brim with deadly combustibles. Through my telescope, I could see concealed grappling irons at the yards and the bowsprit, ready to be secured to our rigging if the deadly craft got close enough.

  ‘Damnation, Mister Giffard,’ I cried, ‘we need more leeway, sir!’

  ‘Helm’s answering fast as it can, Captain. Can’t do more, sir.’

  In truth, our dash for the exposed stern of the Dutch flagship had literally given us too little room to manoeuvre, especially given the Merhonour’s propensity to manoeuvre like a heavily pregnant sow. Barring a miracle, the more nimble fireship would be upon us in minutes.

  Calm, boy. I suddenly recalled my grandfather’s journal of the Armada fight, and the eternal truth displayed when our own fireships were sent into Calais. Most of the fireship’s work is done for it by the dread that its very name and appearance inspires. It is a weapon of terror; thus the way to defeat it is to display no terror in the face of it.

  ‘Mister Webb!’ I bellowed at the gunner. ‘Larboard broadside to fire at will, as she aims! Mister Lanherne! Thirty men, as many with small arms as can be supplied, with me!’

  With Roger at my side, I drew my sword and leapt down the ladder from the quarterdeck into the waist. As our larboard guns opened fire, we ran down the starboard side to the forecastle. Lanherne joined us with a somewhat mixed party that included Tremar, Treninnick, Macferran and a dozen or so of the Welshmen. Oakes, the armourer, had done them proud: they bristled with muskets, pikes, hatchets and grenadoes.

  ‘Your orders, Captain?’ Lanherne asked.

  ‘We do the thing he least expects. He expects us to be afraid of him. Let’s make him afraid of us instead!’

  With that I jumped up onto the larboard rail and claimed a few rungs of the foremast shrouds. It was obvious that the Dutchman was heading for our bows, for that was ever the fireship’s tactic of choice. The profusion of stays, shrouds and gammoning made it the ideal place to secure his grappling hooks before the crew lit the fuse and made their escape.

  Our larboard guns fired again, and at least three balls struck home into the hull of the fireship. Now Lanherne’s men joined me at the rail, firing musket-shot and lobbing grenadoes at the few Dutchmen visible on deck.

  ‘Come on then, you butterbox bastards!’ I shouted, hoping that Cornelia would forgive me. ‘You need more of your courage inside you before you tackle the Merhonour! Cheese-farters! Hogen-mogen whoremasters!’

  Encouraged by their captain, the Merhonours unleashed a torrent of vitriol against the Dutchman, waving their fists, prodding their pikes and firing their muskets at the oncoming vessel. Our defiance must have unsettled the enemy crew. Many great ships had been lost because their men panicked at the very approach of a fireship. The Dutchman must have expected to encounter a similar reaction aboard the Merhonour, especially because the element of surprise seemed to have weighed the odds so heavily in his favour. Instead he found our battery intent on hammering him before he could get close, and a gang of raucous, latrine-mouthed, heavily armed men waiting for him at the very point of attack. A couple of the Dutch moved out tentatively onto their bowsprit and made ready their grappling hooks, but Macferran, who had learned shooting by stalking deer and clan feudsmen on the Scottish moors, levelled his musket calmly, fired, and saw his target’s torso explode in a fountain of blood, tissue and bone before the Dutchman fell forward into the sea.

  That was enough for the Dutch crew. They began to clamber out off the sally-port near the stern just as flames erupted from the chimneys set into the deck. They had fired their deadly cargo without securing to us, hoping that the momentum of wind and tide alone would bring their hull crashing into the side of ours. The updraft from the chimneys carried the flames into the rigging, and within moments almost the whole of the upper deck was alight.

  Only one Dutchman had reached the longboat secured alongside his ship before our battery fired again on the downroll. A lucky shot smashed into the longboat, which disintegrated. We were close enough to see the looks of horror on the faces of the other crewmen. The flames were already licking about the foot of the quarterdeck and the mizzen; they knew they were about to be burned alive by their own weapon. A few jumped, but only two heads came back to the surface and struck out for the increasingly distant Maas flagship. We watched in horror as one man ran back up onto the quarterdeck, as though believing the very stern of the ship would be somehow immune from the flames. He caught fire, and ran, all in flames, to the ship’s side, throwing himself off into oblivion.

  But the danger to the Merhonour was still not past. The fireship was still coming on, barely musket range from us now, and would surely strike us amidships –

  The Bachelor’s Delight cut under our stern, turned smartly along our quarter and made directly for our fiery foe. Roberts raised his hand to me in a friendly wave, seemingly without a care in the world. The ketch gathered speed and rammed the fireship forward.

  ‘Magnificent,’ said Roger d’Andelys in admiration. ‘Now that man fights like a Frenchman.’

  I did not reply, for I could only stare in horror at the spectacle unfolding before me. To this day, I do not know what Roberts originally intended: whether he somehow hoped that a
glancing blow would be enough to deflect the fireship, or whether he hoped to secure a towrope and pull her out of harm’s way before she ignited properly. But now fate took a hand. The bowsprit of the Bachelor’s Delight became entangled in the rigging of her opponent. Flames danced along the ropes. A spit of fire caught the ketch’s foresail. Within moments, the Delight was ablaze from stem to stern.

  I thought I caught one final glimpse of the valiant Roberts. I fancied he remained at the helm, the flames consuming him at his post. I felt a sudden and guilty realisation: I had never known the man’s Christian name.

  * * *

  We were well clear of the terrible conflagration. I took a long, welcome draught of bitter Suffolk beer, silently saluting the memory of poor Roberts and the men of the Bachelor’s Delight. My other officers knew better than to interrupt their captain’s anguished contemplation of the sacrifice that had been made to save the Merhonour and, with it, the life of Matthew Quinton.

  I looked away to the east. We were perhaps a quarter of a mile away from the duelling flagships Eendracht and Royal Charles, upon their larboard quarters. We could not see what was happening away to the west or east, where the Blue and the White would still be fighting their own battles, but here, at the centre, something of an amphitheatre had formed around the flagships. Individual British and Dutch ships, or small groups of them, were engaged all around, and I had just given the order to go to the assistance of the Diamond, to the north, which seemed to be weakening under the onslaught of a large Amsterdammer. Between Merhonour and the flagships lay open water, upon which floated broken spars and yards; and, perchance, a few score bobbing, twisted shapes that could only be bodies, or parts of bodies. Oared boats and small craft occasionally braved the murderous crossfire, scudding desperately in search of safe water.

  The thunder of gunfire was incessant. Every few minutes, the Eendracht would fire a broadside into the Royal Charles; and just as surely, the Charles would respond in kind. I could see only smoke from the starboard battery of Eendracht as she fired, but the Dutch flagship was smaller and lower, so the larboard battery of the Duke’s ship was partly visible from our position and I saw the flash of some of her guns as they fired in their turn. The sails and rigging of both ships were torn to pieces. Canvas hung in shreds from yards, broken ropes danced crazily in the breeze. The ensigns of both ships were almost unrecognisable, so many were the shot-holes in them. The Lord High Admiral’s flag at the fore of the Royal Charles, and the royal standard at her main, were but tattered fragments of their former glory. And yet men were still upon the yards, and through my telescope I could make out other men upon the decks. There seemed to be smoke rising from the galley chimney of the Eendracht; perhaps the Dutch were so confident of victory that they intended to take their dinner as they fought.

 

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