As a man may do in the privacy of his own thoughts, Faulkner conceived a curious notion that the rapid healing of his wound owed more to the intercession of the dead Mainwaring than the skill of his surgeon. He chid himself for so Popish a notion, but nevertheless the conviction grew so that he always thereafter held it to be Mainwaring’s last beneficent act towards the wretched, starveling boy he had lifted from the gutter.
Scheveningen and After
July – August 1653
Some weeks later, as Faulkner readied the Union for sea, he received an order by fly-boat from General Monck. ‘My dear Captain,’ he read, flattered by the cordiality of the mode of address,
I intend to withdraw the main part of the fleet shortly and am earnest that you should as soon as may be convenient, but at all costs before the end of the present week, station yourself off the Texel whither De With withdrew after the late action. I understand from intelligencers at Den Helder that the Dutch squadron under him is ready for sea and anxious to rejoin Tromp here off Flushing. Pray, therefore, bring me notice of any such move that De With might make. This is properly work for a frigate, but I would have a ship of force there, for fear of a lesser vessel being overwhelmed.
It was a concise brief in which Faulkner knew likely as much as his commander-in-chief and this sense of personal inclusion seemed to be embodied in the simple signature: ‘Monck’. Faulkner was gratified by the confidence the General clearly felt in him, for the task was a post of honour, and particularly so, given Faulkner’s past. He passed word for Clarkson and his charts.
Two weeks later, in mid-July, having been on station off Den Helder with the Haak Sand under his lee and a few nights of anxiety under his belt, Faulkner received a second note from Monck which simply informed him that he was back on his station in the mouth of the Schelde but would come north and show himself off the Texel. ‘The enemy having made no move, this is the period of greatest danger,’ Monck had concluded.
A few days later Monck’s fleet, or the greater part of it, some eighty sail of men-of-war, came up from the south and, for a week, cruised off the Texel. Then, suspecting his absence from the Schelde would have tempted Van Tromp to move, he brought the Resolution close up under the Union’s stern and hailed her.
‘I shall be gone from here after nightfall, Captain Faulkner,’ he shouted in his harsh voice. ‘Maintain your station and keep me informed. Do you hoist an admiral’s lanterns tonight.’
Jumping up on the carriage of a gun, Faulkner waved his acknowledgement of the instruction. The Union bearing Monck’s lanterns would maintain the pretence at least until tomorrow’s dawn, beyond which it would be impossible to conceal the truth from any watcher on the dunes at Kirkduin, but it might prove sufficient. Thus, shortly after nightfall, he was aware of Monck’s ships slipping away like predatory owls, dark and sinister shapes, half seen, yet pregnant with menace.
The deception failed, however. The following forenoon a sail was seen heading towards them from the south, beating up against the wind. As she got closer she fired a gun to leeward and hoisted a signal that, owing to her aspect, no one aboard Union could make out until one of the junior officers with better sight than his seniors expressed the opinion that it signified an urgent despatch. Although none of his seniors could agree, the outcome proved him right. Heaving to under the Union’s lee and hoisting out a boat, her commander had himself pulled across to the larger vessel, and almost ran up the Union’s side.
Faulkner had hardly read the note, seen the captain of the fly-boat over the side of the Union with a glass of wine inside him and returned to his cabin to consult his charts in the light that Van Tromp was at sea, than Whadcoat sent down for him.
‘They’re coming out,’ he said shortly, by way of explanation, when Faulkner reached the deck and took the proffered telescope. It was a bright summer day with masses of white, fleecy cloud building over the land as Whadcoat pointed to the low line of sandy coast which gleamed yellow in the sunlight. Where the yellow line broke, indicating the gap between the mainland of Holland and the island of Texel, he could clearly see the mass of shipping, the dark, beetle-like hulls each with its heap of white sails as the squadron of De With emerged for battle.
Faulkner looked aloft. The Union was hove to under easy canvas on the starboard tack, dipping to the low swell and leaning slightly to the wind from the west-north-west. The enemy would be hard on the wind coming out, but the moment they were clear and could head south, the wind would be fair.
‘Very well, let us fill the main tops’l and make for the General.’
‘Head south. Aye, aye, sir.’
Whadcoat turned away to bellow orders and a moment later the pipes twittered, the main braces made the block-sheaves rattle and the main yards came round. Suddenly the Union was under way, finished with dipping and curtseying to the enemy’s shoreline, filled with a sense of urgent purpose that no amount of assurance that lying off an enemy’s coast keeping watch could match. Faulkner could almost feel the mood of the men lift. He summoned all his officers to his cabin, and told them what he knew.
‘Van Tromp is at sea, gentlemen,’ he said, looking round at their faces. He picked up a pair of dividers and referred to the chart that showed the gentle curve of the coast of the province of Holland, with the Frisian island of Texel to the north and the archipelago of large islands in the estuary of the Schelde that formed the province of Zealand in the south. As for their own cruising ground, it occupied that swathe of the sea known as the Broad Fourteens, owing to the uniformity of its fourteen-fathom depth. ‘There has been an inconclusive engagement off Katwijk.’ He indicated the little town to the south with his dividers. ‘De With is clearly seeking a junction with Tromp. The General is pursuing Tromp and we lie betwixt the two fleets.’ He paused to let the gravity of their situation sink in. ‘We must, of course, maintain contact with De With, but keep out of trouble ourselves.’ A murmur of assent ran through the assembled officers. ‘My guess is that the two fleets will engage here. He laid the points of the dividers on a coastal town. They leaned forward, several trying to pronounce it with its harsh guttural sound. ‘I think I have the advantage of you,’ Faulkner said with a hint of irony, referring to his period of exile among the Dutch. ‘Schveningen,’ he articulated, scraping the name, so odd to English ears, from the back of his throat. Some of them sniggered like schoolboys; there was no explaining the strange ways of foreigners, no wonder they had to be fought. Conscious of their thoughts, Faulkner smiled to himself. If it helped them risk their lives in battle, he would not deny them their xenophobia. ‘That is all for now,’ he said. ‘When the time comes I have no doubt but that I may rely upon you all.’
They shuffled out, only Whadcoat remaining. ‘Skayven . . . what-do-you-call it?’ he said and Faulkner stared at him, unsure whether Whadcoat was manifesting a hitherto hidden sense of humour, or exhibiting a serious sense of curiosity. Faulkner pointed again to the location on the chart and repeated the name in a manner more phonetically comprehensible to an Englishman of Whadcoat’s background.
‘Skay-ven-ing-gen.’
‘A fit place for an enemy,’ Whadcoat pronounced solemnly.
‘I suppose so,’ Faulkner said with a smile. ‘And now I suppose we had better observe the enemy’s motions.’
Matters moved swiftly that day. De With sent three of his fastest frigates to cut off the Union, so Faulkner was obliged to stand to the south-west to avoid being caught between the two Dutch fleets, knowing that De With would not pursue him far off his native coast. It was therefore the following morning, once he was certain that the enemy frigates had thrown up the chase, before Faulkner dared turn east and within an hour they could see from the Union’s quarterdeck a pall of grey smoke lying like a fog bank along the horizon. Shortly afterwards they could hear the thunder of guns.
Her yards braced up and every stitch of sail drawing, the Union drove down into the battle which, as they approached, seemed to stretch from north to south. Eac
h fleet was over one hundred strong, an immensity of sea power contesting for the advantage. As Faulkner, flanked by Whadcoat and Clarkson, whose hand now bore only a thumb and two fingers, studied the action, they could form no real appreciation of the disposition of the contending squadrons. Much was obscured by dense smoke, but occasionally they could see a man-of-war tack, so that Whadcoat, remarking that these seemed to be wearing the English ensign, observed that, ‘They’re passing back and forth through the enemy formations.’
‘Just like a troop of horse,’ added Clarkson with some little contempt for the cavalrymen sent to command seamen, but with more prescience than he then knew.
‘We had better follow their lead,’ Faulkner said, closing his glass with a resolute snap. ‘We’ll haul up the courses the moment we get into the smoke, so I’d be obliged if you would take your posts. Good fortune . . .’
‘And may the Lord of Hosts favour our just cause,’ said Whadcoat with that solemnity that Faulkner had grown accustomed to.
‘Amen to that,’ added Clarkson as he moved away to pick up his speaking-trumpet and stand beside the helmsmen.
‘Cripple ’em before we hull ’em, sir?’ asked Whadcoat. ‘It renders them better to our purpose.’
‘Double-shots aloft and then knock out your quoins, if you think you can do it without losing time.’
On the point of walking off to command his guns, Whadcoat swung round. ‘Rest assured of that, Captain Faulkner,’ he said with reassuring warmth. Faulkner stared after him for a moment, listening to him roar encouragement to his gun crews as, in passing, he relayed Faulkner’s intentions to the junior officers at their batteries.
Twenty minutes later the Union and her people were in the very thick of what proved the fiercest battle of the war.
Although the action had begun at seven that morning and the Union did not engage an enemy ship until about eleven, there nevertheless followed hours of fighting in which, like all the other ships of both sides, no man knew clearly what was afoot. Brooding upon the fight in the days that followed, Faulkner was apt to think the common seaman, working at his gun with monotonous servitude, had the better bargain. He had, of course, to keep what the terrifying experience left of his wits about him to maintain the religious sequence of sponge, load, ram and fire for fear that, as sometimes happened when men were exhausted or drugged by the smoke, smell, noise and horror of it all, the drill got out of kilter and a charge was rammed home before a gun had been sponged. The hot chamber would ignite the charge and the rammer might be killed stone dead, speared by his own ramrod while the gun, going off prematurely, would recoil unexpectedly, its entire weight driving its loaded carriage over the bare feet of the rammer’s mates who might be clearing the touchhole. Such accidents occurred from time to time and were the chief concern of Whadcoat’s fellow lieutenants as they held their men back from such follies, while at the same time driving them to ceaseless exertion.
But at least these men, down in the lower gun deck, were generally better protected than their fellows on the upper deck where the darting splinters, or wreckage shot down from aloft, could maim and wound. Perhaps the most vulnerable of the seamen were those directed to tend the braces as the ship was manoeuvred under Faulkner’s direction and Clarkson’s detailed supervision. They had to expose themselves in handling the braces, the clew and buntlines and, where necessary, in dousing or making sail. In an action such as was fought of Scheveningen that last day of July 1653, there was a constant trimming of the yards as the warring ships passed each other, wheeled and re-passed, all the while pouring a withering fire at and into each other as they sought not the advantage over their opponents, but their destruction.
In the terrible hours that followed the Union’s opening broadside, discharged into a Dutch frigate on the fringe of the main battle as Faulkner carried her into the mêlée under a press of canvas, the superior weight of shot combined with the brutal speed with which the English gunners plied their weapons told against the Dutch. For all their gallantry and Tromp’s brilliant manoeuvring, the work of attrition could but have one outcome. As the day died and the sun set against the flaming glory of the western sky, the Dutch began to fall out of the action. One by one they deserted their flagship, the battered Brederode, where Admiral Marteen van Tromp’s body lay as it had done since before noon, when an arquebusier in the English ship Tulip had shot him. Some twenty Dutch ships either were sunk or surrendered as their fellows drifted away, followed by the English who chased them back into the Texelstroom, the anchorage off Den Helder.
Just before the daylight faded, Monck threw out the signal to anchor off the English coast and the fleet to withdraw.
It was past four bells in the first watch, ten of the clock that evening, before Faulkner left the deck. Clarkson had been killed and Whadcoat wounded. Faulkner himself was, mercifully, relatively unscathed. He had suffered a terrific thump in the breast, but his cuirass had saved him, though its smoothly curved plate was dented and the impacted depression pressed painfully upon his body when he drew a deep breath in exerting himself. He had – somehow, though he never recollected how or quite when – also suffered the entire destruction of the right sleeve of his broadcloth coat. The presence of wooden slivers indicated the passing of a larger splinter, perhaps a shower of the deadly things, for the upperworks of the Union were found to be badly knocked up at daylight next morning.
Nor was he ever quite clear how many enemy ships they had engaged, or how many times they had engaged the same enemy man-of-war, though he had clear and distinct impressions of fleeting moments – of Clarkson’s hideous death when a Dutch round shot passed through his lower body so that his loins were shot out and his trunk was blown clean off his legs and seemed to dump him, limbless on the planking. He and Faulkner had been addressing one another, shouting to make themselves heard and the sudden descent of Clarkson’s face transfixed with a look of stark incredulity had been almost comic. Blood poured from him, spattering Faulkner’s breeches and boots as it slowly fell over, the face wearing the same astonished look. The passing of the ball spun Faulkner so that he slithered in the gore and all but fell, recovering himself as the horror of what he had witnessed coalesced into the realization that Clarkson was dead.
From that moment he had to handle the ship directly himself. The twin tasks of looking for any move the enemy might make, the descent on their unengaged side – when they were unengaged – and of giving the precise orders to handle the ship, fell upon him with the removal of Clarkson. However, their rig was so maimed that the requirement for smart manoeuvring petered out as the afternoon drew on and by the end of the battle he was grateful that they had the stumps of three masts, a bowsprit and its short topmast to spread some sail upon.
He remembered, too, a lengthy engagement with a Dutch man-of-war of larger size than the Union. Although he could not recall her name, his mind’s eye carried the recollection of her guns spitting fire into the Union and the stout ship shuddering to the multiple impact of their shot. He also recollected her captain, a large man with a florid face exhorting his men who, catching sight of Faulkner, doffed his hat. The action, so unexpected, so oddly civil among the parody of the civilization of which the two commanders were representative, prompted a reciprocal action on Faulkner’s part.
As he sank on to the deck under the shattered windows of his cabin, there being no furniture to hand, he summoned Whadcoat to join him. Staring at his first lieutenant who, apart from a face blackened by powder smoke, looked little different from the officer who had left him hours earlier, Faulkner offered him a glass of wine.
‘My God, Mr Whadcoat, but the Lord looketh after his own.’
‘Indeed, I am blessed, sir, though we have a butcher’s bill of near thirty men.’ Whadcoat eased himself down, his back to a gun carriage so that, in a different setting, they might have been taken for a couple of farm labourers taking a spell from their work.
Faulkner blew air from his lips in a low whistle. ‘All de
ad?’
‘Nineteen, with six bearing mortal wounds, so Whitaker tells me.’
‘And the wounded?’
‘Forty-six likely to survive, if the surgeon and his boys do not kill ’em with their ministrationing.’
Faulkner nodded at the curious turn of phrase. ‘And you, you are unhurt, or are you deceiving me?’
‘A few passing balls winded me, a small bore ball shot off my baldric, damn it, but I am otherwise unscathed.’
‘Remarkable.’
‘Poor Clarkson. I saw what was left of him before they tipped him to the fishes.’
Faulkner nodded as the horror of the memory flooded back and made his blood run cold. ‘We were speaking together when he was hit . . .’ Whadcoat remained silent, then drained his glass. ‘Have another,’ Faulkner suggested. Whadcoat thanked him and they refilled their glasses.
‘We lost Lieutenant Black, a promising young man, and two of Clarkson’s mates were wounded, one of them is among those not expected to live.’
‘Which one?’
‘I forget his name,’ Whadcoat said casually, adding, ‘the one with the curly hair.’
‘John Gooch,’ said Faulkner.
‘That’s him.’
‘What was the large Dutchman we engaged? Did you get her name?’
Whadcoat smiled. ‘I might have done if they called their ships sensible names but she was eighty guns and we passed her four times and . . .’
‘Four times? I had no idea and would not have put money on it being more than twice.’
‘Four times, for the truth of it, and we had her alongside for at least twenty minutes at one stage.’
‘God’s wounds but the din of battle leaves one confused.’
‘Aye, you are exposed to the hot hell of it all on deck. One gets a respite down below and can take a peek through a gun port from time to time. I saw her name across her transom, all red and gold and as long as a horse’s tail but I could make not a head nor a tail of it.’ Whadcoat drew greedily on the wine, then added, ‘I think she must have been a flagship by her size.’
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