King, Ship, and Sword

by Dewey Lambdin

  A fortnight ago, though, I attended a new Theatre in the Hay Market with Brigadier Heathcote, a friend at Horse Guards, and who should be the Owner, and lead Actor in the Sketches but one Pulteney Plumb, assisted by his émigré Wife, Imogene? While not a Garrick, this Plumb was quite impressive at Comic turns, but a few seconds behind a Screen where coat or wig changes transformed him to half a dozen roles & the same for his Wife! Their entire Show is a series of Entre-Acts employing Jugglers, Mimes, and scantily-clad girls as well as Song & Dance turns.

  Heathcote, of an Age with me, was All-Amort, for he remembered an Ensign Pulteney Plumb, then in his late Teens, on the Staff of “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne round the time of that worthy’s Defeat and Surrender to the Yankee Doodles at Saratoga. Heathcote, a Lieutenant then, further recalled to me that this Plumb fellow was appointed more for his theatric Abilities than his Martial skills, Gen. Burgoyne famed for his own amateur Acting and Play Writing. There was some Scandal anent Plumb, who sold up his Commission before a Court-Martial could be Convened, though after 25 Yrs. the Particulars escape Heathcote’s Memory. If ever back in London, you might attend, for the Girls are quite Fetching, and . . . Obliging, ha! The man must have Prospered nicely, for Plumb owns the Theatre, a Town house, and a retreat out in Islington as well as several other rental Lodgings, I have learned. . . .

  Lewrie felt a fresh shudder of dread to think that he had put his life in the hands of a comic, quick-change artiste, a mountebank, and an utter fraud! It could have gone a lot worse!

  “The Yellow Tansy, mine arse!” he gravelled, picking up another letter. “Hello! A Captain Speaks? Oh, yes,” he muttered, breaking the wax seal and opening it, relieved that Speaks, whom he had replaced in command of HMS Thermopylae, had survived his pneumonia.

  Sir,

  There were four coal-burning Franklin-pattern stoves when you relieved me of Command, Stoves which I had Purchased with my own Funds for the Comfort & Health of my Officers & Men. Where the Hell are They? I am unable to contact the Purser, Mr. Pridemore, as to the Whereabouts & can discover no trace of them with shore Authorities at Chatham or Sheerness when Thermopylae was laid up In-Ordinary.

  They are quite Valuable. I would not like to entertain the Notion that a Post-Captain & Commission Sea Officer so Distinguished could be so remiss as to lose them, or sell them for Personal Gain, but . . . do you know their Whereabouts, I urge you to discover it to me by the next Post, else I shall press a suit in the London Court of Common Pleas to recover the Stoves, or their Value!”

  “Oh, Christ,” Lewrie said with a disbelieving groan. “Another bloody court appearance?” It was too silly to be countenanced. He called for his steward.

  “Aye, sir?” Pettus replied.

  “My shore-goin’ rig,” Lewrie said, shovelling that letter into a desk drawer . . . for much later.

  “Right away, sir!”

  I’ve earned it, I’m due it, Lewrie told himself as he rose to dress; I’m goin’ ashore, and get very, very, very bloody-drunk!

  AFTERWORD

  After the initial sense of relief the English people felt when told of the Peace of Amiens, they soon realised that there really was no living with an expansionist, republican France, or Napoleon and his ambitions, and that the war would re-erupt sooner or later. When it did start again, they were mad for it, volunteering by the hundreds of thousands for the Army and Navy. The Addington goverment was pressured from the sidelines from the outset by Lord Grenville, Windham, the ousted William Pitt, and later by the king himself, to goad the French into taking the blame for it by the means described in this tale.

  And when the Crown finally sent Napoleon an ambassador, their pick was the haughty, supercilious, top-lofty Lord Whitworth, who with his wife, the equally insulting Duchess of Dorset, could piss off just about anyone, from boot-blacks to saints, most especially the touchy Napoleon Bonaparte!

  There are two very good books I can recommend to readers with a desire for more background; Napoleon by Vincent Cronin, a wonderful biography, and The War of Wars by Robert Harvey, which covers all the events of the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic War, from the start of the Revolution to Waterloo, providing even more insight into Napoleon’s life.

  It was not Napoleon’s short stature that formed his psychobabble “Napoleon Complex”; most people were short in those days. His insecurity came more from a lifetime of being the perennial outsider, and a poor one at that. More Italian and near-peasant Corsican than a Frenchman, even if the Buonapartes were very minor aristos in their provincial hometown of Bastia; jeered at for his olive complexion, his grammatical errors when speaking or writing French that wasn’t pure Parisian; his simple tastes in food and wine, and his utter shyness at his schools. He might’ve only had one testicle, too, and if the provenance of the physical remains of his privates are true, he could have been cruelly teased as “Pinky-Finger the Flea F ___er” by prostitutes he hired, or early lovers he attempted to woo.

  Once in a position of power and wealth—recall he was Corsican, born to the vendetta, the “Get Even”—he trusted his (untrustworthy) kinfolk who were just like him, rather than more sophisticated and more capable people than himself.

  One of the things that really got up Napoleon’s nose were the British papers, and the caricatures of him which depicted him as an African, an Arab after his failed Egyptian Campaign, a wee fellow with a big nose and a yellow complexion (think Homer Simpson), and he truly didn’t understand that the Crown could not censor or stifle those caricature artists, essayists, and editorialists like he could any French paper that did not please him.

  Napoleon could make himself Consul for Life, crown himself the Emperor of the French, form a Bonaparte dynasty with his brothers and sisters to rule the rest of Europe, with all the trappings of a Roman emperor, yet never understood why the world treated him like a boorish nouveau riche parvenu! That rankled him!

  New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory . . . Man, is Charité de Guilleri going to be mad enough to kick furniture when she learns that Napoleon will sell it all to the United States to finance his new war! Enough so to try to murder him in a future book, perhaps? Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, was negotiating with the American emissaries, Livingston and Monroe, in Paris, offering not just New Orleans but the whole kit and kaboodle” for a hundred million francs, and dealing under the table for a cut of it to support his hedonistic lifestyle. Napoleon did want a French Empire in North America but, with a war sure to come, saw that he could not hold it for long. “They [the American Commissioners ask of me one town in Louisiana; but I already consider the colony as entirely lost,” Napoleon wrote, according to George W. Cable in The Creoles of Louisiana. Congress actually debated whether to pony up all that much “whip-out,” or just march down to New Orleans and take the bloody place . . . S’truth!

  Cable also cites Napoleon’s private conversation in the gardens of St. Cloud with M. Mirabois, one of his ministers he trusted a lot more than Talleyrand, even then: “Well! You have charge of the Treasury; let them pay you 100 million francs, pay their own claims (from the Quasi-War, US vs. France, in 1798) and take the whole country.” When asked about the sentiment of the French in Louisiana, who had longed to be re-united to France, he rather coldly told Mirabois to “send your maxims to the London market.” Napoleon always was a cold-blooded bastard when it came to what France thought, or to his casualty lists.

  M. Laussat, a French colonial prefect, with a very small, mostly civilian party, reached New Orleans on March 26, 1803, to let those Creoles know they would soon become French again, and that General Victor (remember him, loafing around in Holland, waiting for a slant of wind?) would follow with a large army to secure the territory.

  On November 30, 1803, the official exchange was held in the Place d’Armes before St. Louis Cathedral; cannon were fired, the flag of Spain was lowered, and the Tricolour soared aloft to the tune of “La Marseillaise”; the keys to the city of New Orleans were handed to L
aussat, to the delirious joy of Louisianans.

  Just twenty days later, however, on December 20, Laussat handed those same keys over to representatives of the United States, and the grand illusion was over, to Louisianans’ utter consternation.

  The bulk of the troops present were American; there was no Gen. Victor, no “large body of French soldiers,” and the actual French contribution might have amounted to a Corporal’s Guard. With so few weeks between exchanges, there certainly were some bemused Spanish troops loafing about to witness it all, waiting for a ship out.

  Now, was that Captain Blanding’s and Lewrie’s handiwork? I’d certainly like to imagine that their taking of those ships off the Chandeleurs caused their absence. After all, that’s what historical fiction is all about . . . ain’t it?

  So here’s Alan Lewrie with his lifelong nemesis, that crooked Guillaume Choundas, dead as mutton, and the 1803 version of PetSmart crab food; his house and rented land sure to be lost (hey, it happens in the best of families, don’t it!) and not one, but two, sons in the Royal Navy! Will Sewallis prove to be good at it, or will he come a cropper and rue his forgery and his decision? Hugh is in good hands, but will he survive and prosper?

  Lewrie has had his period of grief and mourning; the demands of his frigate, his men, and the Navy are now his life, but . . . at some point in the future, we all know the life of a monkish widower simply can’t be tolerated any longer, and it’s good odds he’ll kick over the traces and get back to his old troubles ashore, in his idle hours.

  And what about those pestiferous Franklin-pattern stoves? Will he end up in court again? If he can’t find what Mr. Pridemore did with them, will the prize-money due for the defeated French squadron get him off the hook?

  All these matters, and a few more—perhaps with some naughty bits slung in for giggles . . . will be revealed in the forthcoming installment of the Alan Lewrie naval adventures . . . or mis-adventures, so please you! My editor and I have settled on the title The Invasion Year. ’Til then . . . enjoy!