For King or Commonwealth (29 page)

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. Each 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 dead?'

‘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.'

‘We shall never know,' Faulkner mused, ‘whose deaths we caused or what ship they manned.'

‘'Tis no matter, sir. 'Tis not our business but the Lord's. He is our sure shield and will gather the Godly to his bosom and leave the rest to the devil.'

‘You take a sanguine view, Mr Whadcoat.'

‘I live in bloody times, Captain Faulkner, and get little liberty to worry. My time will come one day and while I am thankful it came not today, I am ready to answer for my sins before the throne of the Lord of Hosts.'

‘As we all must surely do but I too am glad that it was not today.'

‘Who has the deck?' Faulkner asked.

‘Lieutenant Jefferies.'

‘He is unhurt?'

‘A scratch enough to impress his lady, but nothing to worry about.'

‘Good. He is a competent young man.'

A silence fell and Faulkner had almost fallen asleep when Whadcoat asked, ‘What do you think the General will do, sir?'

Faulkner shrugged. He could barely see Whadcoat now in the gloom of night. His face was a pale oval that seemed to swim in his tired vision. ‘Oh, we will anchor in Hollesley Bay under Orfordness, or Sole Bay off Southwold, depending upon the tide and then recruit and re-rig. Then, I wouldn't wonder, we shall be back off the Texel and the Schelde until the Dutch realize they are beaten.'

‘I think they took drubbing enough today. I do not think they will look for another fight for a while.'

‘I hope that you are right.'

But Whadcoat's head had fallen forward upon his knees and a gentle snore drifted through the cabin so that Faulkner, too, let go of the day and drifted into oblivion.

‘Well, Kit, you are well regarded, I believe. Indeed, I heard the Lord Protector noticed you.'

‘You speak as though I had secured the regard of a King, Nathan.'

‘Well, your name was among those mentioned in Parliament.'

Faulkner made a gesture of deprecation. He found his brother-in-law's adulation strangely at odds with his usual sober view of the world. There were rumours of peace, it was true, and Gooding's business would better prosper if shipping could proceed upon its lawful occasions without the intervention of hostile Dutchmen, but this was all too much. He had not yet laid up the
Union
and had only a few days in London before he must return to Chatham and await events. ‘That was entirely due to General Monck's kindness,' he said by way of explanation. ‘I rendered some service to him but I was not the only one to have done so.'