The Blast That Tears the Skies (2012) (33 page)

Charles had told me the truth of the ‘twenty captains’ at
Lynd-bury
, but I still found difficulty in believing it. The story was indeed a canard, as Clarendon had said, but it was certainly not a canard of Sir Martin Bagshawe’s making.

‘
Arlington
,’ my brother had said, as we stood alone in the
half-ruined
chapel of Louise’s home, keeping vigil over her coffin. ‘It was of his devising, although of course he denied it to my face when I visited him and presented him with Bagshawe’s testimony – the testimony of the man whom Arlington had bribed and browbeaten into instigating his scheme. Bagshawe had too many dubious friends among the fanatics, and had incurred too many debts. Arlington could at once intimidate him into doing his bidding while also buying his silence – or at any rate, could do so until the plague condemned Bagshawe to death and thus destroyed his hold over him.’

‘Arlington?’ I was incredulous, yet perhaps not quite as incredulous as I might have been; for I recalled Arlington’s behaviour toward me at Clarendon House and his insistence upon the reality of the ‘twenty captains’ in the face of Clarendon’s scepticism. ‘In the name of dear Heaven, Charles, why would Arlington concoct such a tale – spreading suspicion and discontent in our fleet just as we were about to face the Dutch?’

‘Precisely for that reason, Matt. Create suspicion of the old Commonwealth captains and what might be the outcome, especially if our fleet did not obtain a decisive victory, thus seeming to give credence to such doubts?’

I recalled the council of war at which His Grace of Buckingham had demanded a command; and in those days, Buckingham was ever the staunch ally of My Lord Arlington. ‘A wholesale purge of the old captains,’ I said slowly, the realisation seeping into my veins, ‘and only cavaliers to be entrusted with commands.’

Charles nodded. ‘Aye, and more, I’d say. I’ll wager Arlington intended to use the tale as an excuse to attack the man who advocated commissioning those old captains in the first place.’

‘The Duke of York! And if Arlington undermines York –’

‘He undermines York’s father-in-law.’

I was incredulous. ‘He would play such games when the kingdom is at war? When so much is at stake?’

My Lord of Ravensden smiled. ‘I know Arlington better than you, Matt. Have known him for many years. I think he would say that the highest stake of all is to be the supreme authority in England, beneath the king; that the war will not be prosecuted vigorously while Clarendon holds the place; that Clarendon will never act firmly enough against the dissenters and malcontents; that Clarendon, at bottom, is simply not Arlington.’

‘Surely the king will dismiss him for this?’

‘Dismiss him? Lord, no. His Majesty has precious few clever men about him, and none are cleverer than Arlington, for all his faults. And he is hardly likely to dismiss a man for advocating the promotion of ardent royalists.’ Charles shrugged. ‘The king will rebuke him, I have no doubt, but it suits him well to keep Arlington and Clarendon in balance. Without the one, the other becomes too powerful.’

But it is better that he believes your story of Bagshawe’s guilt, Charles, rather than the truth
. So it had transpired as my brother predicted. Arlington remained in office, with the truth of his conspiracy concealed from his rival Clarendon – concealed, no doubt, so that the king could dangle it like a sword of Damocles over the Secretary of State’s head, a sword to be unsheathed whenever it suited the royal purpose. But as we stood there, alongside the coffin of the Countess Louise, I began to wonder whether Arlington’s dark scheme had one other ingredient to it. Prince Rupert had recommended me for the
Merhonour
, I now knew, but he had no say in where that ship would be stationed in battle. Instead, I recalled the Secretary of State’s words to me at Clarendon House:
we have prevailed upon His Royal Highness to place you directly behind Lawson’s new flagship, as his second
. A callow young gentleman captain, promoted to command a ship far too large for him, his head filled with a great statesman’s insinuations of a plot: might not such a captain perhaps rashly open fire upon the wrong ship at the wrong moment – at such moments, say, as the
Guinea
’s misfired broadside, or when the
Royal Oak
failed to tack and follow Rupert – and thus trigger the very dissension in the fleet that Arlington wished to engender?

Thus it was that summer of 1665 in England. Plague, war and death cast their dark shadows over the land; the rulers of the kingdom made shuttlecocks of the lives of a thousand score of men, Matt Quinton among them, simply to further their own petty interests; and a witch’s daughter did all in her power to fulfil the comet’s dire prophecy, and to bring the fourth horseman to England’s fragile shore.

* * *

Charles Stuart had refilled his glass, but was contemplating the object intently. ‘Finest Venetian, this,’ he said. ‘Unexpected, in Salisbury. Better than any I have at Whitehall, I’ll wager. My Lord Chancellor does have expensive tastes, does he not?’ He turned to me suddenly. ‘Well then, Matthew Quinton,’ said the King, almost as though he were contemplating me for the first time, ‘so now you are privy to one of the deepest secrets of the state.’ I was still thinking of the machinations of My Lord Arlington, but the king evidently had another matter upon his mind. ‘The human weakness of my late father – although of course, I would be the last man on earth to condemn him for that.’ The
fornicator immensus
of our times smiled. ‘So, Matt, does the knowledge crush you?’

‘As you say, Majesty, they were but very human weaknesses, and a very long time ago.’

‘True, but with very urgent consequences in our own time, I think.’ The king’s face clouded, masking in an instant his previous good humour. ‘For instance, Captain Quinton, have you considered how it was that the late countess suddenly discovered that her new family might be harbouring some great secret that could be of considerable embarrassment, or worse, to the crown of this realm?’

The directness of the king’s question took me aback. I had never given it a thought. ‘No, Sire. The chatter of servants, perhaps?’

‘Not so, Matthew Quinton. It was you.’

Me
? I could say nothing: the king’s simple words, and his stern, dreadful face, stunned me into silence and despair.

My brother looked at me dispassionately and said, ‘It seems you have an enemy, Matt. A most influential and inveterate enemy, who has lately been taking a particular interest in the history and connections of the House of Quinton. An enemy who, shall we say, rather took my wife under his wing and introduced her to his close ally, Ambassador Courtin. He passed on to her various tales about our family that are mentioned within the King of France’s secret archives. Rumours about the fate of Earl Edward, for instance – so she could feign an interest in that story, the better to conceal her sponsor’s true target, the liaison between our mother and the king.’

‘Montnoir,’ I said in horrified realisation. ‘Gaspard de Montnoir would go to such lengths to wreak revenge upon me, and upon England?’ The memory of the black-cloaked Knight of Malta and envoy of the French king, who had clashed with me during a previous voyage, still came to me in nightmares. I had defeated and humiliated Montnoir, but I had known full well that he was the sort of man who would one day seek vengeance.

‘Quite so,’ said Charles Stuart. ‘All kings are troubled by factions in their realms, trying to pull them this way or that, and my cousin Louis is no exception. I am vexed principally by fanatics, dissenters, republicans and all their strange kin. His chief burden comes from extreme Papists, those who believe even the present Pope to be too liberal and daily endeavour to persuade Louis to herd all his Protestant subjects onto bonfires. For such men, even a King of England who is remarkably tolerant to Catholics and seeks to be a good friend to France is considered a damnable heretic. It seems that your foe is one of the principal voices within this camp – that is, when he is not scouring the Mediterranean in his galley, looking for Mahometans to kill.’ The king sniffed. ‘So it seems, Matt, that I have you to thank for interesting this Seigneur de Montnoir in my affairs.’

‘Majesty,’ said my brother, ‘I feel certain that both Captain Quinton and Lord Percival will do their utmost to protect both you and the House of Quinton from Montnoir’s infernal machinations.’

‘I will hold you to that,’ said Charles Stuart. It was impossible to tell whether he was jesting or in earnest. ‘But, gentlemen, perhaps the Frenchman and the late countess have actually done us a great service. When all is said and done, they have brought us finally to confront a great issue that should have been resolved many years ago.’ The king looked at me with what for him approximated an expression of kindness. ‘By the admission of your mother, Matt, it is entirely possible that the Earl of Ravensden, here present, is the son of
my
father, not yours. He certainly bears no resemblance to your father Earl James, nor to your grandfather. I remember them both well.’ The king stepped very close to me, that vast, bulbous nose only inches from my own. ‘So we have to consider the possibility that a grave injustice has been done to you all these years, Matthew Quinton – that since the age of five, you have been the rightful and legitimate Earl of Ravensden. You would be entirely justified if you sought to assert your rights. So, gentlemen, what to do?’

I had thought long and hard upon this during the ride from
Lynd-bury
from Salisbury, for I knew full well that the question was bound to be asked. My brother looked keenly at me, and then at the king; the man who was, perhaps, his other brother.

‘Majesty,’ I said slowly, ‘there is no certainty that Charles and I did not share the same father. My mother’s opinion is but that – it is not fact.’ The thought of my ancient, crabbed, righteous mother as a nubile young courtier, betraying her husband with no less a lover than the King of England, was still truly shocking to me. ‘And faces can disappear in families for generations, then suddenly reappear in a newborn. So we also have no certainty that Charles does not resemble some long-dead Quinton whose portrait was never made.’ Charles Stuart, whose entire lack of resemblance to both his parents was a byword, nodded thoughtfully. ‘This being so, it seems to me that Charles is as likely to be the rightful Earl of Ravensden as I am. And this being so, then Earl of Ravensden he should remain, for to take any other course would be to do the work of Montnoir and Lady Louise for them.’

And with that, my lifelong fear – the dread of inheriting the earldom – fell away like a redundant husk. For I
had
inherited it, twenty years before; and now I had made my one and, I prayed, only decision as the rightful Earl of Ravensden.

Charles Stuart scrutinised me closely, as though searching for any signs of doubt or falsehood in my statement. Then he drew himself up and grinned. ‘Truly noble! Aye, truly noble indeed! A credit to the House of Quinton, which has always been one of the staunchest bulwarks of my ancestral throne. So, Charlie – Earl of Ravensden you remain.’

My brother came to me and embraced me warmly. ‘I am forever in your debt, Matt.’

Making that statement was evidently a deep embarrassment to this most guarded of men. Fortunately, King Charles began circling us, talking almost to himself.

‘But we have to consider the other case,’ said the king, ‘which is the possibility that a very great wrong has been done to you all these years, Matt Quinton. Now, one of the more pleasurable aspects of kingship is that God has bestowed upon us a certain ability to right wrongs.’ Thus Charles Stuart resumed the royal ‘we’, transforming himself by that simple grammatical act from a devious rutting mortal into a kind of demigod. ‘In this case, it is easier to justify because of the manifest merit that you have displayed in our cause, most recently by your bravery and good conduct during the late battle of Lowestoft, and the most earnest solicitations on your behalf by our cousin, Prince Rupert, and our son James of Monmouth.’ He stopped before me and smiled broadly. ‘Your sword, Matt.’

Scarcely believing what was happening, I drew the blade that had belonged to my grandfather.

‘Well, bow, man!’ laughed Charles Stuart, taking the sword in his hand. ‘We’re the same height, after all, so if you don’t lower yourself, I’ll probably decapitate you!’

I bowed deeply before the king, felt the blade touch my shoulders, and heard the four words that I had dreamed of all my life.

‘Arise, Sir Matthew Quinton!’

Much of the action of
The Blast That Tears the Skies
is based on the actual historical events before, during and after the Battle of Lowestoft (3 June 1665). Like so many battles of the age of sail, this was a confusing encounter, and several of the contemporary accounts contradict each other; this is only to be expected, as there were over two hundred ships fighting simultaneously in a sea area up to ten miles long and several miles wide, with thick clouds of gunsmoke and the profusion of sails and hulls often restricting vision to the immediate area around each ship. However, some modern accounts of the battle overstate the confusion and present a distorted impression of the action. Although there remains some doubt about the preliminary manoeuvres, several of the key elements are beyond dispute: notably the British fleet’s two tacks from the rear (a feat never again accomplished in the entire era of sailing navies); the fumbled hoisting of the signal flag aboard the flagship, the duel of
Royal Charles
and
Eendracht
leading to the destruction of the latter, the heroics of the
Oranje;
the confusion over the command and provincial jealousies within the Dutch fleet; and the pursuit of the Dutch. The Battle of Lowestoft was arguably the worst naval disaster ever suffered by the Dutch navy, certainly the worst of its magnificent ‘golden age’ that stretched for roughly a century from 1572 to 1688, and it has been reconstructed accurately and in some detail in both Frank Fox’s superb study of the second Anglo-Dutch war,
The Four Days Battle,
and in my
Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649–89.

The rumour that twenty former Commonwealth captains intended to defect to the Dutch during the first battle of the war was reported confidently at the time, notably in the despatches of the Venetian ambassador. The Duke of York’s narrow escape when the three courtiers nearest to him were killed, and the presence of his dog aboard the flagship, are well documented, as is the mysterious shortening of sail after the battle. There was a strong contemporary rumour alleging that Henry Brouncker had been carrying out the Duchess of York’s instructions to preserve her husband’s safety at all costs; this formed the basis of Andrew Marvell’s vitriolic attack in the
Second Advice to a Painter
and underpinned the parliamentary enquiry into these events in 1668. Brouncker’s own account, previously unknown but which I discovered in the British Library a few years ago (Additional Manuscript 75,413), suggests that the disastrous decision was probably based on an unfortunate series of misunderstandings. There was no ship called
Merhonour
in 1665, although a man-of-war of that name had served with distinction between 1590 and 1650. I have drawn aspects of the fictional story of Matthew Quinton’s Merhonour from the histories of several real ships of the period. Similarly, the loss of the
House of Nassau
during the battle is based upon the almost identical fate of Captain Robert Wilkinson’s
Charity.

In order to accommodate the timescale of the plot, I have modified some of the chronology of 1665 to a certain extent. The
London
blew up on 7 March, rather than somewhat later as implied here; the Duchess of York’s visit to the fleet at Harwich took place rather earlier than I have set it. The most significant change has been to bring forward the worst effects of the plague by a couple of months. The court did not leave London until the beginning of July and went initially to Hampton Court, then to Salisbury and eventually to Oxford. The comet at the beginning of 1665 (there were actually two) and the dire predictions that followed in its wake are recorded in Pepys and many other contemporary sources. Pepys also chronicled the unfounded rumour that De Ruyter had instigated a massacre at Guinea, the catalyst for the attack upon Cornelia on London Bridge; this
canard excited popular sentiment to such an extent that a guard had to be placed around the Dutch ambassador’s residence. I have taken a slight liberty with the composition of the council of war, in order to enable Matthew to attend it. In this period there were actually two councils, an ‘elite’ one comprising the flag officers alone and a council of all captains, the former meeting more frequently; but to have replicated this pattern exactly would have been to overburden the narrative, and I needed Matthew present at the meeting (actually held on 12 April 1665) when the Duke of Buckingham petulantly demanded a place by virtue of his rank
.

Sir William Coventry did indeed possess a circular desk of his own devising; this was satirised mercilessly by Buckingham, his arch-enemy. The widespread belief that Coventry sold naval offices for his personal profit eventually led to a parliamentary enquiry, which exonerated him. The accounts of Clarendon House, the destruction of the London (together with the presence of women and many of Sir John Lawson’s relatives aboard her), the rise of the Earl of Falmouth, Lord Arlington’s scar, the Duke of Monmouth’s presence in the fleet and the French embassy of the duc de Verneuil and Courtin are also drawn from the historical record. Both the membership of the Royal Society and the experiment undertaken by Tristram Quinton are based closely upon fact; variants of the latter were actually undertaken by Daniel Coxe on 19 April and 3 May 1665, as recorded in Pepys’s Diary. My descriptions of the plague in London are also based principally on Pepys, together with various modern accounts, Defoe’s
Journal of the Plague Year,
and ‘fieldwork’ at the plague village of Eyam. Defoe’s most famous work,
Robinson Crusoe,
was first published in 1719; the ‘first English novel’ swiftly became a runaway bestseller. Francois-Marie Arouet, alias Voltaire, lived in exile in London from 1726 to 1729, during the time when ‘old Matthew’ would have been writing his journals
.

Admiral Edward Russell, Earl of Orford, is not known to have served at sea until the year after the events described in this book. But his subsequent career developed exactly as Matthew describes it, except for the slight 
dramatic licence that I have taken of having him buried at Westminster Abbey, rather than in the Russell family mausoleum at Chenies where he lies to this day. The nickname of ‘Cherry Cheeked Russell’ was contemporary: the extant portraits of him display the characteristic clearly enough, even if he had not been the man responsible for the creation of ‘the largest cocktail in history’ (a historical phenomenon described in minute detail on many websites). His atrocious spelling is apparent in all of his extant letters. John, Viscount Mordaunt of Avalon, is another character drawn directly from history; he was one of the leaders of the ‘Sealed Knot’, the secret royalist organisation of the 1650s. Other real characters appearing in this book include Sir John Lawson, Sir William Penn, Sir William Berkeley, the Earl of Marlborough, Sir William Petty, and of course John Evelyn and the Pepyses. Although I have invented the character of Ieaun Goch, the legends of the
derfel gadarn
and of the physicians of Myddfai are well known in Welsh folklore, and the dubious nature of many of the Welshmen recruited for the fleet during the Anglo-Dutch wars is confirmed in contemporary reports
.

Unlike both his sons, the famously moral and monogamous King Charles I did not father a brood of illegitimate offspring. Nevertheless, several potential bastards of his, albeit markedly implausible ones, have been suggested over the years: these include John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, the notorious poet and rake, and, more plausibly, Joanna Bridges, who was living at Mandinam near Llangadog, Carmarthenshire, in 1648. Joanna was said to have been the daughter of Charles and the much older Duchess of Lennox; she subsequently married the noted churchman Jeremy Taylor. Her story, along with the alleged affair of the Duke of Buckingham and Anne of Austria from
The Three Musketeers,
provided the inspiration for the story of the uncertain paternity of Charles Quinton, Earl of Ravensden
.

Finally, I am aware that I have done a grave disservice to the memories of Bastiaan Senten, the true captain of the
Oranje
at the battle of Lowestoft, and of the officers and men of the
Mary,
which played the part
in the saving of the
Royal Charles
that I have assigned to the
Merhonour
(and which suffered even more terribly for so doing); like Matthew Quinton, her captain, Jeremy Smith, was knighted for his efforts. Senten’s ship behaved almost exactly as described in this book, earning her crew the profound admiration and respect of her opponents, and very nearly changed the course of the action by so doing. It is therefore particularly ironic that ‘Senten’, who died about half an hour after receiving the personal approbation of the Duke of York, was probably an expatriate Scot, originally named Seaton. I hope that this book will honour both his memory and that of the thousands who fought, suffered and perished on both sides during the Battle of Lowestoft
.