The Shadow of the Eagle

by Richard Woodman

  It was a pleasant stroll across St James’s Park towards the abbey. They walked in silence for a while and then Elizabeth, casting a quick look over her shoulder at Frey and Catriona Quilhampton who lingered behind them, remarked, ‘You seem to have made an impression on young Frederic Marlowe, my dear.’

  Drinkwater grunted. ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘Rather a lot. He said you saved him from a fate worse than death.’

  ‘I’d say that was rather overstating matters. He was simply in some distress, both personally and professionally. He was concerned at the unexpected delay in our return to London …’

  ‘Ah,’ observed Elizabeth perceptively, ‘then the lady was expecting.’

  ‘Good heavens, Bess, do you miss nothing!’

  ‘And professionally?’ Elizabeth prompted.

  ‘Oh he had had some experience that had not passed off well. He was unsure of himself

  A bit like Humpty-Dumpty? Only in this case the king’s men did put him back together again?’

  ‘Yes,’ laughed Drinkwater, looking at his wife. ‘Damn it, Elizabeth, but you are a lovely woman.’

  The letter from Bushey was waiting for them when they arrived at the house in Lord North Street. Williams handed it to Drinkwater on a salver and, after he had struggled for a moment one-handed, Elizabeth rescued him from his embarrassment just as Catriona and Frey entered the room.

  ‘Some tea, Williams, I think,’ Elizabeth ordered as the company sat.

  ‘How is the arm, sir?’ Frey asked.

  ‘Oh, pretty well, Not for the first time Kennedy saved me, though I suspect he rather wished I had got my just deserts.’

  ‘Nathaniel! That’s an ungrateful thing to say!’ Elizabeth was profoundly shocked.

  ‘Oh, you don’t know Kennedy, m’dear.’ Drinkwater flicked open the letter, read it while the company waited — all by now aware of the writer — expectantly watching Drinkwater’s face.

  ‘Well?’ Elizabeth asked, as, expressionless, Drinkwater laid the letter in his lap.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What news? What does His Royal Highness write to you about? Or is it more secrets?’

  ‘No, no.’ Drinkwater took a deep breath. ‘He has promised Birkbeck, who was my especial concern, a dockyard post.’

  ‘That is good news, sir,’ commented Frey approvingly.

  ‘Yes.’

  And … ?’ Elizabeth prompted and then, when Drinkwater sat silently, fisted her hands and beat them into her lap. ‘Oh, Nathaniel, why do you have to be so tiresome? Either tell us, or say you cannot!’

  Drinkwater looked up with a familiar, wry smile upon his face. ‘Well, my dear, His Royal Highness’, he said the words with sonorous and deferential dignity, ‘has been so impressed with the actions of Andromeda and, though modesty prevents me from laying undue emphasis upon the point, with my services …’

  ‘Oh, Nathaniel, please go on, you are submitting us to the most excruciating torture.’

  ‘Please do tell us,’ put in Frey.

  ‘Catriona, m’dear,’ Drinkwater appealed to his red-haired guest, ‘surely you don’t want to hear this nonsense?’

  ‘Oh, but I surely do,’ Catriona replied in her soft Scots burr.

  ‘Very well,’ Drinkwater sighed. ‘His Royal Highness has been graciously pleased to suggest I am made a knight-commander of the Bath…’

  ‘Why, sir,’ exclaimed Frey leaping up from his chair, ‘that is wonderful news!’

  Drinkwater looked at his wife. She had gone quite pale and held both hands in front of her face while Catriona looked concernedly at her friend.

  ‘You had better hear me out,’ Drinkwater went on. ‘His Royal Highness also says that since hauling down his flag, he is not presently in a position to recommend me, but that he’, Drinkwater unscrewed the letter and read aloud, ‘ “will ever be completely sensible of the great service rendered to the nation by His Majesty’s frigate Andromeda in the late action off the Azores and, should His Royal Highness be in a future position to honour Captain Drinkwater, His Royal Highness will be the first to acknowledge that debt in the aforementioned manner …”’

  Drinkwater crushed the letter with a rueful laugh amid a perfect silence.

  ‘I think it is time for bed. It has been a long and eventful day.’ Drinkwater stretched and Frey tossed off his glass of oporto.

  ‘Sir, before we retire I should like to acquaint you of my, of our, decision.’

  ‘Of course, Frey. Pray go on.’

  ‘You will have guessed,’ Frey said, smiling, ‘my proposal has been accepted.’

  Drinkwater stood and held out his hand. ‘Congratulations, my dear fellow.’ They shook hands and Drinkwater said, ‘I am glad you don’t share Hyde’s opinion of marriage.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘That it was a noose.’

  ‘Doubtless Hyde would find it so.’ Frey paused, adding, ‘I know the lady to be …’

  ‘Please say no more, my dear fellow. The lady has much to commend her and James would be pleased to know you care for Catriona, for her existence has not been easy. I am delighted; we shall be neighbours. Come, a last glass to drink to all our futures now that the war is at an end.’

  ‘If not to your knighthood.’

  ‘Ah, that…’ Drinkwater shrugged. ‘There is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.’

  Both men smiled across their glasses, then Drinkwater said, ‘You know, in all the years I have been married, I have never been at home longer than a few months. Perhaps my permanent presence may not be an unalloyed joy to my wife.’

  ‘That does not constitute a noose.’

  ‘No, but I would not want it to be even a lanyard …’ Drinkwater paused reflectively and Frey waited, knowing the sign of a germinating idea from the sudden abstraction. ‘You will live at Woodbridge when you have spliced yourself with Catriona?’ he asked at last.

  ‘That is our intention, yes. I shall have only my half-pay and intend trying my hand at painting. Portraits perhaps.’

  ‘That is a capital idea; portraits will be all the vogue now the war is over, but I too have an idea which might prevent any talk of nooses or the like.’

  ‘I guessed you were hatching something.’

  ‘What I am hatching is a little cutter. It occurs to me that the coming of peace and the decision of Their Lordships to break up the Andromeda leaves us without a ship. We could have a little cutter built at Woodbridge and I daresay for fifty pounds one could get a tolerable yacht knocked up …’

  ’We, sir?’ Frey frowned.

  ‘I daresay you’d ship occasionally as first luff with me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Frey grinning hugely, ‘I daresay I might.’

  Drinkwater nodded with satisfaction. ‘Then the matter’s settled.’

  Author’s Note

  At the time of Napoleon’s abdication, negotiations between Talleyrand and Tsar Alexander, who was then resident at the chateau of Bondy, were conducted by Caulaincourt and Count Mikhail Orlov. Among the subjects discussed was the most suitable place to exile Napoleon. St Helena and the Azores were suggested. In the event Elba was chosen, with the inevitable consequence that discontent at the resumption of Bourbon rule allowed Napoleon to return and seize power again, only to suffer final defeat at Waterloo in June 1815. Although it was to be Alexander who approved Elba in the teeth of opposition from the British and the Austrians, Alexander’s complex but essentially vacillating, capricious and quixotic nature was such that so clement and generous a decision may easily have contradicted an earlier, harsh and extreme one. As the most charismatic sovereign among the crowned heads, the role of allied leader fell to Alexander almost by default. He had been captivated by the spell of Napoleon’s personality and suborned by the insidious influence of Talleyrand. Alexander nevertheless saw himself as the implacable enemy of Napoleon, the usurper, who challenged the concept of legitimate monarchy with a new, unorthodox and dangerous creed. />
  From Alexander’s meeting with Talleyrand at Erfurt in 1808, the wily Frenchman had begun manipulating the Tsar, insisting the peace of Europe rested with him, not to mention the future of France. Alexander’s own position rested almost entirely upon two props; the weight of his armies, with their patient, peasant soldiery, and the British gold which kept them in the field. And along with the implicit expectations of Britain, he had to balance the demands of Austria. Both countries were represented by brilliant statesmen, Castlereagh and Metternich, whose intellects far surpassed Alexander’s own. Among them all, however, Talleyrand must be regarded as the most able. He was careful to distance himself from the more disreputable goings-on, but we know he was distantly party to a number of stratagems which he doubtless encouraged as a means of distracting attention from his own plans. There was, for instance, a group who wished to assassinate Napoleon, so the humbling of Britain in the wake of the humiliation of Napoleon is a not improbable option considered during the negotiations between Bondy and Paris in the uncertain spring of 1814.

  The atmosphere was thus ripe for plots by officers loyal to Napoleon, and there existed a number of these groups pledged to restore the Emperor. A growing Bonapartist faction laboured under the impositions of the first Bourbon restoration, increased the discontent among the middle classes and ensured Napoleon received a rapturous reception when he finally returned from his Elban exile. Most significant was the loyalty of the French army in its entirety. It is said that when the former Imperial Guard paraded for Louis XVIII, they had murder in their eyes.

  As for Louis, I have taken few liberties with the sparse accounts of his Channel crossing. Prince William Henry had formerly commanded the frigate Andromeda and while accounts vary as to whether he was aboard the Royal Sovereign, the Impregnable or the Jason at the time of the return of the Bourbon king, I have followed Admiral Byam Martin’s recollections, which seemed the most credible, as he knew the Prince well and had a low opinion of him. In a letter to his son, George FitzClarence, Prince William Henry himself boasted he commanded ‘our fleet’ off Calais. The squadron under his flag did, however, include French and Russian warships as well as the principal Trinity House yacht. A painting of the event was exhibited by Nicholas Pocock at the Royal Academy in 1815. HMS Impregnable was commanded by Henry Blackwood who had been captain of the Euryalus at Trafalgar. Blackwood had been created a baronet and hoisted his flag as an admiral before the end of 1814. Sir Peter Parker of the Menelaus was less fortunate; he was killed later that year in the United States near Baltimore, where he had landed to create a diversion during operations against the Americans.

  During the period of Napoleon’s exile on Elba, the allied plenipotentiaries assembled at Vienna to determine the future shape of Europe after the fall of Napoleon and break-up of the First French Empire. The congress was characterized by its dances more than its debates and the former allies nearly came to a renewed war, with Britain and Russia leading opposite factions. Napoleon’s father-in-law, the Emperor Francis of Austria, was vigorously opposed to the deposed Emperor’s presence so close to his own possessions in northern Italy, as well as against any further intimacy between Napoleon and his daughter, Marie-Louise. To effect the latter policy he appointed Count Neipperg to her entourage with instructions to seduce the Arch-duchess. Neipperg’s successful debauchery ensured the intellectually dull Marie-Louise forgot her husband and, after Napoleon’s death, married the one-eyed, but dashing count.

  During the tortuous negotiations in Vienna and Napoleon’s occupation of the Elban throne, his ultimate fate continued to be discussed, and both the Azores and St Helena were again suggested as possible final solutions to the problem of what to do with the quondam Emperor. At one point the purchase of an Azorean island from the Portuguese was considered. In the event, the dilatory nature of the debates, the increasing discontent in France and the refusal of Louis XVIII to pay Napoleon his pension, guaranteed a brief, heady success for Napoleon as he returned to France for what history knows as ‘The Hundred Days’. The action however, immediately united the congress, which unanimously declared Napoleon an outlaw with the consequence of ultimate defeat for his cause at Waterloo, and his final exile on St Helena.

  Taking advantage of the wranglings and intrigues at Vienna, Talleyrand skilfully rehabilitated France among the first rank of European powers. Indeed at one point when a new war seemed inevitable, the idea was mooted that Napoleon himself be brought home from exile in order to command French armies in the field against the Russian faction!

  Thus was the eagle finally caged, though Captain Nathaniel Drinkwater was to play one last part in the drama during the Hundred Days.

  * * *

  notes

  Footnotes

  1

  See 1805

  2

  See In Distant Waters

  3

  See The Bomb Vessel

  4

  See Under False Colours

  5

  See A King’s Cutter

  6

  See Beneath the Aurora

  7

  See An Eye of the Fleet

  8

  See The Flying Squadron

  9

  See Beneath the Aurora

  10

  See The Corvette

  11

  See Under False Colours

  12

  See The Flying Squadron