Gentleman Captain (7 page)

Even without all of this, I faced for the second time in my life the prospect of taking command of a ship. I remembered with a shudder those moments on the quarterdeck of the doomed
Happy Restoration
at Chatham the previous summer, when my commission had been read and I could feel one hundred and thirty pairs of eyes scanning me, assessing me quite accurately as an ignorant and wildly overdressed popinjay, made captain of a ship of war on no better grounds than having the king's friend for a brother. All of them, from Aldred down to the ten-year-old cook's servant, knew full well that I had been the most junior officer in the minute Royalist army-in-exile, and had fought in precisely one battle, on the beach before Dunkirk, at which that army had been routed in no time by a lethal combination of the French and Cromwell's Ironsides. A land battle. They also knew full well that before taking command of their ship, I had served but one voyage at sea on a man-of-war, and that as a virtual passenger. To the crew of the
Happy Restoration,
I was as little qualified to command at sea as Damaris Page, the great bawd of Drury Lane, and dear Christ in Heaven, how right they had been. And how they had suffered for it, the poor wretches.

This time would be very different, I vowed to myself, and with the empty road stretching before me I began to rehearse out loud the reading of my commission, that essential and mysterious sacrament during which the command of a king's ship is assumed by her new captain. This led to embarrassment just south of Guildford when some farmhands, resting unseen behind a hedge, overheard my recitation and hooted at me as a madman, but adopting greater discretion thereafter, I quickly discovered the necessary tone. This time, I would be assured, and commanding. I would project my voice to the front of the ship, which was what I still called the bow, and I would be dressed modestly but impressively, the Earl of Ravensden's borrowed black cloak flowing at my back.

By the time I stopped to rest and water my horse, I was confident in my peroration, and confident too in the task that the king had entrusted to me. This time, I vowed, I would know my sea-trade. Aboard the
Happy Restoration,
I had believed it was beneath the honour of a ship's captain, and an earl's son to boot, to demean himself with such mechanic concerns as navigation, and a hundred men had died for it. This time, I would complete my mission, no matter how difficult it proved, and I would bring the
Jupiter
and her men safely home. There was honour and redemption in such success, but there was more, too. Succeeding in a task that the king himself regarded with such importance–preserving one of his kingdoms, no less–was bound to deserve reward, and what reward could be more appropriate, or more desirable, than a commission in the Life Guards?

The sun came out as I rode out of the bad inn at Petersfield where I had taken some bread and ale, and my soaring hopes lifted higher still. Saving the throne of Scotland was worth more than a commission; it was worth a knighthood, surely? As I had done several times a day for as long as I could recall, I could almost feel the touch of the royal sword on my shoulder, and I mouthed to myself the magical words of my lifelong dream: Arise, Sir Matthew Quinton'. I remembered sitting on my uncle Tristram's knee as he tried to mend the heart of a child broken by the death of its father with tales of gallant knights, of Hotspur and the Black Prince and Sir Philip Sidney. He told me the stories of the Round Table, of Lancelot, and Galahad, and his own Tristram, his name-knight. Before I was ten, I could recite much of old Mallory by heart, and my uncle encouraged me to think of my fallen father as a knight like those of older times,
sans peur et sans reproche,
riding to glory and immortality on Naseby field. When my twin sister lay dying of the sweating sickness at Ravensden Abbey, that bitter winter of '53, I blamed Cromwell and his New Model soldiers, who had ransacked our home days before as they searched for correspondence from my brother, thus frightening the wits out of my poor, pale, dying Henrietta. Even as we buried her beside our father and grandfather, I imagined myself a grim, armoured knight, cutting down the search party like straw, riding through the galleries of Whitehall itself, and impaling the Lord Protector on my lance like a stuck pig.
To be a knight
...

A sudden sharp shower put paid to my reverie. I was in the low hills that rise steadily toward the summit of the Downs. On either side of the road the stumps of fallen trees stretched away across the land, mute witnesses to the destruction of the English oaks that had built Cromwell's navy and held off his creditors. Such a landscape, and the hard spring rain stinging my face, brought home the miserable truth that knighthood now was something that fat city merchants paid for. King Charles's grandfather, James the First, had even introduced
baronets
–hereditary knighthoods, in essence, that could be sold to the highest bidder. Their scabrous sons and grandsons now strutted about court like peacocks, calling themselves Sir Vermin or Sir Arse-head. Worse, to make doubly certain that he never went on his travels again, our King Charles distributed titles like chaff to those who had so recently been his sworn enemies: men like my other brother-in-law, Sir Venner Garvey, Member of Parliament for some foul Yorkshire borough under the Rump, a regular attender at Cromwell's mock-Parliaments and a trusted advisor of the Lord Protector himself. Now he was a stalwart in the so-called Cavalier Parliament that was meant to be so loyal to its restored king, but somehow was not. Venner Garvey: an obsequious rogue who denounced the king behind his back as an atheist and a libertine while accepting largesse from the royal hand. Poor Elizabeth, for not even the title of Lady Garvey and the three thousand a year which had so attracted our mother to the match could make up for sharing her bed and body with such a loathsome travesty of knightly honour.

By the time I reached the crest of Portsdown hill, I was in bitter and downcast temper once more. My clothes were wet yet I felt overly warm and my stomach was tightening. I reined in and looked down over the great sweep of a view. The smoke of Portsmouth's chimneys rose in the middle distance, tucked into one corner of the low island which stretched away southwards from the old Roman walls of Portchester Castle just below me. A single bridge over a narrow creek separated this marshy, fetid island from the mainland. The square tower of St Thomas's Church, the best seamark for miles, rose above the mean buildings of the town. And away to the left I could make out the king's flag fluttering above the round, low bulk of Southsea Castle, the only other building of note on the island.

There were forests of masts alongside the wharves of the dockyard and filling the broad harbour, the greatest of them belonging to the unmistakeably huge bulk of the
Royal Charles,
formerly the
Naseby–
the ship that had brought our king back from exile. My eyes did not linger on these. I looked further out, beyond the narrow harbour mouth and its grey-stone forts. The Solent channel stretched from the Portsmouth shore to the Isle of Wight, the great dark blur of land beyond. There, between the two shores, several dozen ships sat at anchor. I discounted what was obviously a merchant fleet, starting to move out on a westerly wind, perhaps for the Downs and the North Sea. There were a few more ships nearer the Wight, but even in those days of my deepest nautical ignorance, I knew they were too small and broad to be king's ships. That left two, anchored close to the Gosport shore, across the harbour mouth from Portsmouth. Even without an eyeglass, I could make out the large royal ensigns playing out in the stiff west breeze. The nearer ship was the larger, so presumably the
Royal Martyr.
And beyond her...

I stared pessimistically for several minutes at the distant, dark hull of my new command. There she lay, His Majesty's ship the
Jupiter,
and on her, all my hopes, my whole destiny, and perhaps my very life itself, would depend.

I rode into Portsmouth as dusk fell. The guard on the town gate was rude and perfunctory at first, but a glance at my commission brought him stiffly to attention. During my ride, I had considered taking a room at an inn and going out to my ship in the morning, but the king's stress on urgency decided me for immediate passage out to her. For that, I would need to find one of her boats, which meant I would need to find some of her crew. I clattered through the ordered, silent streets of Portsmouth, responding to occasional challenges from watchmen or militia, then on down the High Street towards St Thomas's and past the house where the great Duke of Buckingham died. Poor Geordie Villiers, my mother always called him, but then she and my father had known the duke well. The favourite of both King James and the first King Charles, Buckingham effectively ruled England for each of them in turn, waged war impossibly and incompetently on both France and Spain at the same time and was struck down by a cheap assassin's knife as he prepared to lead yet another invasion fleet bound hopelessly for France.

There were no Jupiters on this street, and knowing the quality of our English seamen, I knew for certain that there would be none at evening prayers in the church. I stabled my poor exhausted Zephyr at the Dolphin, a reliable inn, where the power of a captain's commission and the name of the Earl of Ravensden would be more than sufficient to ensure he would not be sold to some itinerant Irish horseflesh dealer if his owner did not return to reclaim him within a week. Then I walked out through the walls of Portsmouth by the Point Gate, whereupon I found myself suddenly conjured straight into a scene from hell.

Outside the gates of Portsmouth, on a low promontory that jutted into the harbour, had fetched up every alehouse, whorehouse and worse that wished to escape the regulation of the navy and the town's authorities. Within the space of fifty yards, I saw five heads struck, two men stabbed and one virgin deflowered, assuming, that is, that a Portsmouth maidenhead could possibly have survived intact for fourteen years. Several very drunk sailors spilled out of a rude inn, waving jugs of ale vaguely in the air and singing some obscene verse about the King of France's mistress. Tentatively, I asked, 'Jupiters?', but the mob spilled away down an alley, making a poor fist of rhyming 'Valliere' with 'pubic hair'.

A little further on, a group of six or so men stood on a corner, seemingly sober enough to stand and surprisingly uninvolved in mischief. I asked again, 'Jupiters?'

The most forward of them, a bluff and tobacco-chewing crop-head, cried, 'Jupiters, is it? Aye, we're Jupiters.'

My heart sank like lead. If this insolent creature–as fit a man to be a captain-killer as any I ever saw–was typical of my crew, then my voyage to come would be more fraught than that of old Odysseus.

'Is there a boat for the ship?' I asked.

'Aye,' said Crop-head, 'there's a boat. Down this way, my lord. You follow us.'

I should have stated my name and rank there and then, of course, but I was young, and my senses were being assaulted by a rare combination of smell (foreshore mud, rotting fish and the contents of several hundred pisspots emptied into the street) and sound (screaming women, drunken men, crying children, and not a few screaming, drunken, crying creatures of all ages and genders). As I followed the men into an alley that led towards the shore I did not register the fact that three more slipped in behind me.

Crop-head said, 'Now, my fine lord. Let's take a look at that cloak of yours, and your purse.'

Odds of nine to one gave me pause, of course, but I was a gentleman, and an officer, and there were ways to behave in front of one's inferiors–even if such behaving ended in the grave. I drew my sword. 'I think not. And if you're
Jupiters
men, you'll pay for this with your lives.'

Crop-head had drawn a dagger and was advancing upon me; the others, unarmed, were clearly less enthusiastic. A small crowd of bystanders was gathering at both ends of the alley, interested in spectating at this new sport. Crop-head, slurring slightly, cried, 'Come on, brave boys. This fop wants
Jupiter,
that floating curse. Who hates the
Jupiter?
We're
Royal Martyrs
! Come for a reckoning, then, my fine lord? Come, lads!'

The mob advanced a little, but still reluctantly, all eyes on the sharp and clearly much-used blade of my brother's sword. Knowing now that they were navy men, if not from my ship, I knew I had one last card to play–my finest card of all.

Keeping the sword very firmly in my right hand, I drew out my commission with my left, unfolded it quickly with the fingers of that one hand and shouted as loudly as I could, 'JAMES, DUKE OF YORK AND ALBANY, EARL OF ULSTER, LORD HIGH ADMIRAL OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND, TO CAPTAIN MATTHEW QUINTON, CAPTAIN OF HIS MAJESTY'S SHIP THE
JUPITER
FOR THIS EXPEDITION–WHEREAS I HAVE APPOINTED YOU TO BE CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP ABOVE NAMED, THESE ARE THEREFORE TO WILL AND REQUIRE YOU TO GO ABOARD THE SAID SHIP TO TAKE CHARGE AND COMMAND OF CAPTAIN IN HER—'

The mob stopped in confusion, and even Crop-head looked nonplussed, for the reading of a royal commission was as holy writ. There was whispering among the onlookers. Then the crowd parted, and a vast, ruddy man with a horribly pockmarked face stepped into the alley. He grinned insanely at the sight of bare blades, and in a strangled voice cried, 'Jupiters, to me, Polzeath! For our ship, and our captain!'

A cadaverous, rake-thin man threw down a tankard and moved to the giant's side. Then a third stepped out, small, stooped and simian, making up for his stature with the two wicked curved blades that he carried. At the far end of the alley, three more men appeared. One, little older than myself, was slight and periwigged, an astonishing piece of fashion for such a neighbourhood; more appropriate for the setting was the large club that he held in his hand. The second was jet black, only a broad smile of perfect white teeth declaring his position against the black waters of Portsmouth harbour behind him. The third bore himself like a soldier. 'So, Linus Brent,' called he. Attacking a king's captain, are we? Court-martial offence that, Linus Brent. You'll swing for that. There you'll be, dangling from the main yard of the
Royal Charles,
the shit pouring down your pants. That'll be you, Linus Brent.'