The Battle of All the Ages

by J. D. Davies

  I strode to the quarterdeck rail, gripping it tightly as the ship heeled hard to larboard in the strong wind.

  ‘Well, then, my brave lads!’ I shouted. ‘Let’s show the Dutch butter-boxes what a great English prick can do! Let’s thrust it and thrust it again until we’ve truly pricked the Hollanders’ pride!’

  I offered up a silent prayer of thanks that my Dutch wife Cornelia was not within earshot. I would have suffered mightily for such a tirade against her country of birth; moreover, there was every likelihood that her twin brother Cornelis commanded one of the ships that we were fast closing. But my little speech served its purpose. My crew, many of whom were stout-hearted Cornishmen who had served with me since my second commission, cheered me lustily, waving their fists in the air. But as I smiled, laughed and waved with them, I could not but think upon the odds that we faced, and the two strange circumstances that had brought us to this pass. Why had we received no word of the Dutch being at sea? Above all, why had Prince Rupert and the rest of our fleet been detached, and where in the name of God were they?

  * * *

  But we were not the only fleet with questions to answer. As we began to fall down toward the Dutch, the enemy’s ships came into view ever more clearly. Until then, the strength of the breeze and the choppy waters had concealed a startling fact about our opponents: they were at anchor. Many of them still had their sails furled. Even now, over four hours after the fleets had first sighted each other, only the squadron nearest to us appeared to be getting under way. The sight of their sails filling with the breeze had fooled both Kit Farrell and myself: the bulk of the fleet behind them was immobile. Moreover, many of their ships were far off to the north-east, and would only be able to come into action against us with great difficulty. If the Duke of Albemarle was being unwarrantably bold, then his adversary, the much-vaunted Lieutenant-Admiral Michiel De Ruyter, seemed to be almost suicidally complacent.

  ‘Well, Lieutenant,’ I said to Kit, ‘what do you make of it?’

  My friend and I had our telescopes fixed upon the enemy. I could make out the distinctive ensigns of the five Dutch admiralties: there, the three-barred Prince banner of the Maas and Friesland; there, the nine-barred Triple Prince of Amsterdam and the North Quarter of Holland; there, the Vlissingen ewer jack of Zeeland, where I had lived in exile before the King’s restoration and had acquired a wife. And, just as plainly, I could make out the anchor cables that secured the mighty fleet of the United Provinces to the bottom of the North Sea.

  ‘They cannot have expected us to fight today,’ Kit said. ‘With the strength of the wind, and our weakness in numbers, it would be a reasonable conclusion to draw. De Ruyter will probably have expected us to retire into the Thames. That would have been the strategy of any prudent admiral.’

  The Royal Sceptre heeled even further to larboard. The same was true of the rest of the fleet. We were a glorious sight, bearing down upon the enemy in what was still a rudimentary, incomplete line of battle. Sails filled, flapped and roared in the strong breeze. Spray broke over our bows and those of our fellows as we rode the heavy sea. Yet magnificent as the spectacle was, it betrayed our weakness. We were fewer in number, as Kit Farrell said, but that was not all.

  ‘Nor will De Ruyter expect us to engage when hamstrung,’ I said.

  I went to the larboard rail and looked down. The sea was swelling and breaking above the lower deck gunports, which were closed against the treacherous waters. The same was true of every one of our consorts.

  The eager Rochester joined me.

  ‘Hamstrung, Sir Matthew? How are we hamstrung?’

  ‘We will be engaging the Dutch to larboard, My Lord – that is, fighting them from this side of the ship. Yet the wind is making us heel – that is, pushing us over – so far in that direction that we cannot use our lower deck guns. Our demi-cannon – that is, our heaviest guns, firing thirty-two pounds balls – are on that deck. Whereas the same wind will lift all the Dutch batteries well clear of the water.’

  The young man seemed perplexed by this; as, indeed, the young Matthew Quinton had once been. ‘How can this be, Sir Matthew?’

  ‘It is our English fashion to cram as many heavy guns as possible into every conceivable space on the ship, My Lord, especially low down. So when we are able to lie side by side against the Dutch in a light sea, we have the advantage and can batter their hulls to hell and back. They carry lighter guns, and fewer of them, mounted higher in their hulls. But our ships sit much deeper in the water than theirs, so in a sea like this, we dare not open the lower ports.’

  Just then, we heard cheering from the ships that were close to us. I looked astern, and saw a very familiar ship bearing down rapidly, all sail set as she overtook the entire van. She was a fine spectacle: the Swiftsure, old but still mighty, mounting seventy-two great cannon. A large white flag streamed from her foretopmast. My own men ran to the ship’s rail, shouting and waving. Her quarterdeck drew parallel to ours, and I was barely three-hundred yards from her captain, whose familiar long-nosed face broke into a broad grin. He raised his feathered hat, and I replied in kind.

  ‘Leave some of the Dutch for the rest of us, Will!’ I cried through my voice trumpet.

  ‘Best put on more sail then, Matt, or else De Ruyter himself will be my prisoner before noon!’

  I laughed. It was good to see Will in high spirits again; or, to give him his proper due, Sir William Berkeley, Vice-Admiral of the White and as such my divisional commander, one of my oldest and dearest friends. I had a painful recollection of a drunken evening in a Holborn tavern, some weeks earlier, when Will, far gone in his cups, bemoaned the whispers and barbs that had come his way since the previous summer. His conduct during the Battle of Lowestoft, our crushing victory over the Dutch, had been singled out for criticism: ‘Children in the street taunt me for cowardice, Matt,’ he slurred, ‘and I cannot bear that. In the next fight, I will do whatever it takes to restore my reputation. Whatever it takes.’

  Although it was a warm June morning, the thought chilled me. I stopped laughing, drew my sword, and brought it up grimly in the traditional warrior’s salute. Will, too, became serious. He nodded slowly, then drew his own blade and returned the salute. A moment later and he was out of sight, obscured by the Swiftsure’s stern rail and her huge ensign. But something about the Swiftsure’s course struck me as strange. The same thought evidently occurred to Kit Farrell, who came up by my side.

  ‘He’s luffing up to windward. Why in God’s name is he doing that?’

  Will Berkeley’s course was taking his ship steadily toward the south-west, closer and closer to the wind: in other words, further away from the Dutch fleet he had seemed so intent on attacking but a few minutes earlier. It was exactly the opposite course to one which a man weighed down by charges of cowardice should have been following.

  ‘No signal,’ I said. ‘None that I have seen, at any rate – either from him to us, or from the Duke to him. But we have to follow him, Kit. We are his second in the division. Whatever is in Will’s mind, we have no choice.’

  ‘Oh for the honour of the navy, for the honour of the Quintons,’ said Musk sarcastically.

  I gave my command to Philemon Hardy, the thin, grey-haired ship’s master, who greeted it with open-mouthed astonishment. Nevertheless, he was too good an officer to question his captain’s order. Men scuttled aloft to adjust the sails, which strained noisily against the wind. Orders went to the helmsman to bring the whipstaff over. The Royal Sceptre, and the other half-dozen ships of the Vice-Admiral of the White’s division, began to fall into the wake of their flagship, moving steadily away from the main body of the fleet. Away from the Dutch.

  ‘This is wrong, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit, emphatically. ‘He has no cause to do this –’

  ‘Perhaps he is thinking of the Lowestoft fight, last year, when we of the Red stood to windward, waiting and watching to see where we could attack to best effect.’ I levelled my telescope on the quarterdeck of the Swiftsure
, but could obtain no clear sight of Will Berkeley. ‘But in that battle, we had equal numbers. Now, we only stand a chance of winning if every ship attacks immediately –’

  A gun boomed out. We were too far from the enemy for the engagement to have begun; thus I knew at once what it was. Albemarle had fired off a recall order. He was commanding Will to close up again with the main body of the fleet: to take up his rightful station in the van of the fleet, a station which, by implication, he had deserted. There could not have been a more humiliating, or a more public, reproof.

  ‘God in Heaven,’ I said, ‘what effect will this have on Will? The aspersions of cowardice from last year already haunt him like angry ghosts, and now the Duke dishonours him before the entire fleet.’

  Kit and Musk said nothing. They knew, as I did, that George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, hated gentleman captains. Like many about the court, the duke resented Will Berkeley’s rapid rise from lieutenant to admiral in five years, promotion that had been due entirely to his family’s influence with the King. Albemarle would relish any opportunity to humble the proud young man, and Will’s inexplicable manoeuvre, executed for God alone knew what reason, had given him the perfect excuse to do so.

  But as I gave the orders that would bring the Royal Sceptre back into the line of battle, close to the very front of the fleet, I knew that Albemarle’s hatred was not confined to Will Berkeley alone. I had seen his eyes on me at councils-of-war, and I knew what was in his thoughts. I was almost exactly the same age as my friend. I, too, had risen rapidly to high command and a knighthood, at least in part because my brother was close to the King. I, too, had not been able to tell one end of a ship from another barely five years before. Thus I knew that in the eyes of the Duke of Albemarle, our general-at-sea and supreme commander, I was nothing but another worthless gentleman captain. He did not hate Will Berkeley alone: he hated me, too.

  * * *

  For the next hour or more, I was concerned only with my own ship. I went below, ducking low even on the main gun deck, moving among my crew. They were busy making ready for battle. Great guns were being polished, the cartridges and shot being made ready. Hogsheads of water and soaked blankets were being moved into position, ready to subdue any fires that broke out. Some of the men who could write were making wills, or writing letters to loved ones; those who could not were importuning those who could to write such things for them. Some were murmuring prayers or psalms.

  I stopped from time to time to talk to individual gun crews. I knew most of these men well: I respected them, and I flattered myself that they respected me. Many of them were Cornish, originally part of the crew of the frigate Jupiter, whose command I had inherited in strange circumstances some years before. In due course, they became my own following – volunteers who, for some unfathomable reason, preferred to serve under me rather than any other captain.

  ‘Durdatha whye, Jowan!’

  ‘Dew boz geno, Syr Mathi!’

  Thus I exchanged some of the only Cornish words I knew with John Treninnick, a shambling, bent creature whom one could have mistaken for a cripple. But his condition was caused by many years of labouring in the confined seams of the tin mines; in truth, Treninnick was one of the strongest men and nimblest seamen that a captain could wish to have in his crew. Alongside him stood his messmates, the minute John Tremar and the vast George Polzeath. Dozens of Cornishmen with names profoundly alien to an English ear thronged the deck: Trezise the cooper, Trevaskis the armourer, Carkeek, Hobba, Gummo, Penaluna, and all the rest of them. I had acquired some even more exotic followers during my previous commissions: the likes of Ali Reis, a Moorish renegade, Julian Carvell, a runaway Virginian slave now serving as my coxswain, and Macferran, a fiery-haired young Scots fisherman. These were men I would trust with my life, proven fighters who formed the backbone of a ship’s company that was otherwise largely unknown to me: many of the new recruits were pressed men, chiefly Londoners and northerners, and although most of them seemed to be experienced hands, I had no notion of how they might perform under fire. Several of them eyed me suspiciously, and it occurred to me in that moment that they were thinking exactly the same thing about me. A gentleman captain, no more than five years at sea and only just twenty-six years of age: so just how would this jumped up young royal favourite, Sir Matthew Quinton, behave himself in battle?

  But there was an even more troubling element to the composition of my crew. I encountered it on the lower gun deck, where the ports remained firmly closed against the choppy waters beyond. The dimly lit space could easily have been taken for a bastion of a fortress under siege. It contained five dozen soldiers, uniformed in yellow tunic-coats, busily engaged in the tasks that consume soldiers before any battle: filling bandoliers, sharpening swords and pikes, cleaning muskets.

  Lancelot Parks stepped in front of me and bowed his head in salute. His young Ensign, a keen and bright-eyed lad named Lovell, stood slightly behind him and did the same.

  ‘Your men are ready for the fray, Captain Parks?’

  ‘Ready to write a glorious first chapter in our regiment’s history, Sir Matthew!’

  ‘Let us hope so, Captain. Let us hope so.’

  We exchanged a few more words, but then I beat a hasty retreat. I found Parks almost unbearable: he had about him the eagerness and arrogance that only those who have not experienced battle can possess, and it seemed to me that his example was likely to ruin the prospects of young Lovell. But as I made my way back up the ladders toward the quarterdeck, I knew that I had other, more personal reasons for turning my back on the Marines of the Lord Admiral’s Regiment. Once, I had wanted nothing more than to be an officer of the King’s army; indeed, that was what I had been, albeit briefly, albeit only in the tiny Royalist army-in-exile. Now, though, I looked upon soldiers as all sailors did, namely, as creatures with the intelligence, grace and usefulness of crabs. This new Marine regiment, as yet largely untried in battle, was a case in point. Worse, our governors had decided in their wisdom that these sea-soldiers should replace a significant number of sailors in the larger ships of the fleet. Unsurprisingly, those who knew how to reef and haul resented the fact that they had to put in extra watches to make up for the presence of so many ignorant landsmen. The lower deck lawyers who somehow fetch up in every crew exploited this by promoting the notion that the soldiers were aboard ship, not to fight the Dutch more effectively, but to cow and bully the seamen. Thus there had already been several fights on the Sceptre, many more on some of the other ships of the fleet. I prayed that when it came to close quarters fighting with the Dutch, our men would remember exactly who it was they were meant to be killing.

  I returned to the quarterdeck. Now, at last, there was evidently activity in the Dutch ranks. But it was not a form of activity that I had anticipated.

  Kellett, the bravest and most able of my young servants, handed me my telescope. I joined Kit Farrell and Rochester at the larboard rail. The latter had acquired a telescope of his own, presumably from one of the master’s mates, but he might as well have been looking through it from the wrong end.

  ‘They are fleeing, by God!’ he cried. His tone was at once exultant and disappointed: he could see his hopes of impressing countless young ladies (or lads) of the court with tales of martial valour vanishing upon the wind.

  I studied the Dutch fleet. ‘Whatever they are doing, My Lord,’ I said, ‘they are most certainly not fleeing. That is not the Dutch way. But it remains to be seen just what they are doing.’

  The furthest divisions of the Dutch fleet, off toward the south-east, were still entirely immobile. Among them was a ship flying, at both her mainmast head and ensign staff, the tricolour of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. It could only be the flagship of the admiral commanding the Dutch fleet. Yet the famed De Ruyter seemed asleep, as though there was no English fleet advancing toward him at all.

  The same could not be said of the nearer squadrons. As I watched through my telescope, I saw three ships cut their anchor
cables in their haste to be under way. At the heart of this more active cohort was another great ship flying a Dutch tricolour from the main.

  ‘Tromp is in a mighty hurry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he seeks to avenge his father.’

  Cornelis Tromp, Admiral of Amsterdam, was the son of the great Maarten Tromp, who had been killed by Cromwell’s fleet during the first war between ourselves and the Dutch; a fleet commanded by the same man whose flag now flew from the Royal Charles, General George Monck, the Duke of Albemarle.

  ‘Not only a hurry, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit Farrell, who was studying the motion of the Dutch ships intently. ‘He is forming a line of battle.’

  ‘By God, so he is,’ I said. ‘They have learned their lesson at last.’

  ‘A line of battle, Sir Matthew? What is that, pray?’

  I turned sharply toward Rochester, but just in time, I remembered that not too many years before, the young Matthew Quinton would have asked just such a question. Thus I answered patiently, like a teacher addressing a particularly backward pupil. In truth, the noble lord’s monkey, perched on the ship’s rail close to me and leaning forward with seeming attentiveness, gave the appearance of the more promising student.