J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Matthew Quinton

The Spirit of Not Dead Fred Revisited

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For the next few weeks, I’m going to have my head down as I work on the first of my new Tudor naval novels, so I’m clearing the decks of as many other commitments and distractions as I can – and that includes blogging, for the time being at any rate. So I thought I’d use the opportunity to revisit a few more posts from the earlier days of this website, starting with this one from 2013. I don’t think I need to change or update any of the text, but I haven’t checked that all the links still work.

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I am not dead yet

I can dance and I can sing

I am not dead yet

I can do the Highland Fling

(‘Not Dead Fred’ from Spamalot)

I’ve always been intrigued by the possibilities presented by overlaps between generations. This might have been partly a consequence of the odd generational quirks within my own family: because my grandfather’s formidable brood of siblings (of whom more in a future post) were born twenty-two years apart, my father had a first cousin who was a year younger than me, and there were similar oddities on my mother’s side. Even more marked generational shifts often characterise the complex family lives of aged rock stars, actors and the like, whose children by very late marriages are sometimes younger than their grandchildren via the first marriage. In a historical sense, though, I think I probably first became fully aware of the implications of these chronological curiosities during a talk given to the J R Green Society during the late 1970s. This was the History society of Jesus College, Oxford, named after the finest historian the college ever produced, and the speaker was Richard Cobb, the eminent historian of the French Revolution. My tutor claimed to have invited Cobb so that we undergraduates had a chance to hear him ‘before he went pop’. His pessimism about Cobb’s likely life expectancy was a consequence of a lifestyle beautifully summed up in this obituary from The Independent:

His style of teaching, talking, drinking, and after-dinner behaviour – chariot racing in Balliol senior common room was the least of his exploits – made this shy, often uneasy man a living legend. Cobb was thin, looked like a cross between Voltaire and George VI, and was once described by a friend as the dirtiest soldier he had ever seen. His eyes were usually drunk, with curiosity or alcohol, but his capacity to recover from the night before was the envy of his students. 

The living legend did indeed become fairly well lubricated that evening, but then, so did we all (the passing of the port decanter was one of the long-standing traditions of the society); and despite my tutor’s pessimism, Cobb survived for the best part of twenty more years. I can’t remember most of what he talked about, although whether that can be attributed to the passing of the years or the passing of the port is debatable. However, he related one anecdote which made a lasting impression on me. I forget the precise connections, but it was something along these lines: as a child (he was born in 1917), he knew or was related to an elderly person who, in turn, as a child had known a very, very old lady who remembered watching Bonnie Prince Charlie ride into Edinburgh in 1745. As a good historian, I assume Cobb built in the obvious cautionary warnings about depending on the unsupported memories or, indeed, the words themselves, of two very old people; but his essential point was that it was chronologically possible to be just two degrees of separation away from an event that seemed impossibly far back in time, or in other words, that the past is closer to us than we might think.

Cobb’s anecdote had a lasting impact on both my teaching and my writing. Back in the 1990s, for example, I used to infuriate generations of students by asking them when they thought the last widow of an American Civil War soldier died; of course, it was a trick question, because she was still alive (in fact, the two candidates for the title of Last Confederate Widow died as recently as 2004 and  2008). For all its faults, the dreaded Wikipedia occasionally throws up some fascinating individual pages, and one of them is its list of the last known survivors of major wars. This includes quite a few pretty dubious candidates – Joseph Sutherland, shown as the last British survivor of Trafalgar, doesn’t appear on the listings of those who fought in the battle – but also presents some intriguing claims: was William Hiseland really the last survivor of the British civil wars, dying in 1733 aged 112 (after fighting at Malplaquet at the age of 89)? if Sir Richard Haddock, who served every regime from the Rump Parliament to George I, really was the last surviving veteran of the first Anglo-Dutch war (which I very much doubt), who were the last survivors of the second and third?

But these long-lived survivors are more than mere curiosities; they also represent embodiments of communal memory, as Harry Patch, Henry Allingham and the other last survivors of World War One came to do. For instance, Samuel Pepys often called on Sir Richard Haddock for his recollections of precedents from the 1650s (or even earlier, for Haddock’s grandfather served in Elizabeth’s reign). At one time, too, the wisdom and example of previous generations was deliberately called upon to inspire new generations. In Britannia’s Dragon I relate how, one day in the 1890s, a party of young naval cadets was taken to see Admiral Henry James Raby, the first man ever to wear the Victoria Cross. One of them was duly inspired by the old hero, and recorded the fact in his autobiography: he was to become Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, one of Britain’s greatest naval officers of World War Two.

Similarly, people whom one associates entirely with one era have a disconcerting habit of living on into others. A classic pub quiz round involves giving teams a list of people and asking them whether they’re alive or dead; I once foundered disastrously on Kirk Douglas, having erroneously assumed that he must have shuffled off the mortal coil years ago. (And long may the great man, star of one of my favourite films – The Vikings – continue to grace us with his presence.) The facts that Herbert Hoover outlived John F Kennedy and that Thomas Hardy was around when the BBC began broadcasting still seem downright bizarre. Then again, I once had the privilege of being shown the Imperial Crypt in Farnham, where the Emperor Napoleon III, his wife and son are buried. It was only then that I realised the Empress Eugenie had lived on until 1920, having survived her husband by almost half a century and having lived through the whole of World War I. (Empress longevity is clearly endemic: Zita, last Empress of Austria-Hungary, died as recently as 1989, the last grandchild of the Queen-Empress Victoria died six months before Charles and Diana got married, and, of course, the last Empress of India – the Queen Mother – lived on into the twenty-first century.)

When I came to write the Quinton Journals, all of these perspectives on ‘overlapping’ generations helped to shape my portrayal of Matthew’s character. He’s meant to be writing in the late 1720s when he’s in his late eighties, but can clearly recall his grandfather, who fought against the Spanish Armada (old Earl Matthew’s life dates were based closely on those of the real last surviving Armada captain, Edmund, Earl of Mulgrave, who died at the end of the first Civil War). In that sense, he ‘writes’ very much in the spirit of ‘Not Dead Fred’, although even in his younger days, I don’t think you’d have caught Matthew doing the Highland Fling! Although he was very young when the civil wars took place, Matthew’s life was moulded, and to some extent dominated, by the huge collective trauma of that conflict; indeed, that would have been true of the vast majority of people in the British Isles, and I’ve tried to reflect that in the mindsets of the principal characters in the series. Indeed, when the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ took place in 1679-81, one of the most common cries was ‘Forty-One is come again’ – in other words, that the history of the civil war, which everyone aged about forty-five and over would have remembered, was repeating itself. In my opinion, historical novels should always have this grounding in their own past; after all, as Richard Cobb implied all those years ago, it’s much, much closer than we often think!

The Ensign Flutters Again

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I’m delighted to announce that my new publisher, Endeavour Press, has just brought out Ensign Royal, the Quinton prequel ‘e-story’, which was first released by Old Street two and a half years ago, and which is now available again on Amazon. To mark the occasion, I’m re-blogging the post I wrote to mark the original publication. This is a precursor to some very exciting news about my future plans, including those for the Quinton series, which I hope to be able to announce next week – so watch this space!

For some time now, I’ve been keen to expand the Quinton canon by writing some shorter stories which would be available exclusively on e-readers. There are several reasons for this:

  • Firstly, it will allow me to fill in some of the chronological gaps in the main series, and to explore elements of Matthew Quinton’s ‘back story’;
  • Secondly, it opens up the opportunity to have a greater variety of settings and plots – the main series is constrained to some extent by being perceived by booksellers and some readers exclusively as ‘naval historical fiction’, with all the preconceptions of what that genre should provide, whereas the e-format opens up, for example, the possibility of having stories set exclusively on land, and thus providing a much more rounded picture of Matthew’s life, times and adventures;
  • Thirdly, and above all, quite a number of readers have contacted me to let me know that they’d love to read such stories!
The Battle of the Dunes, by Lariviere
The Battle of the Dunes, by Lariviere

Ensign Royal is a prequel to Gentleman Captain, and deals with an episode alluded to both in that book and other titles in the series – Matthew’s first experience of battle, the Battle of the Dunes in June 1658. Matthew was then eighteen years old and an Ensign in the tiny royalist army-in-exile, marching with its much larger ally, the Spanish army, to raise the French siege of Dunkirk. This battle has always intrigued me: the royalist general, James, Duke of York, had been trained by the French commander, Marshal Turenne (on horseback in the picture), who in turn was the former comrade-in-arms of the Spanish commander, the Prince of Condé, who had rebelled against France’s ruler, Cardinal Mazarin. This tangled web of loyalties was further complicated by the fact that Mazarin, a prince of the Roman Catholic church, had entered into an alliance with the virulently anti-Catholic Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, who provided 6,000 New Model Army veterans to the army besieging Dunkirk – not to mention the fleet moored offshore to bombard the Spanish positions. Thus Roundhead and Royalist armies battled each other one last time, amid the sand dunes of Flanders.

Battle of the Dunes - note the Commonwealth squadron off the coast
Battle of the Dunes – note the Commonwealth squadron off the coast

The Battle of the Dunes, fought, ironically, on exactly the same beaches from which the British army was evacuated in 1940, forms the climax of Ensign Royal. But before then, Matthew has to undertake a dangerous mission to England on behalf of his enigmatic brother, the Earl of Ravensden. This puts him at the very heart of a dark conspiracy, the truth of which he learns only many years later during an unsettling encounter with the last relic of ‘England’s black legend’. But Matthew’s perilous escapades in England and during the Battle of the Dunes also lead to his first meeting with someone who will play a very important part in his life…

 

The 350th Anniversary of the Four Days Battle, 1666

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The posting of this blog coincides with the exact 350th anniversary of the start of the Four Days’ Battle in 1666. Perfectly understandably, all of the media and social media attention focused on naval history this week has centred on the centenary of the Battle of Jutland, so this is my attempt to redress the balance, if only very slightly.

I don’t intend to provide a detailed account of the events of the battle here. For one thing, I’m ‘live tweeting’ specific incidents on my Twitter account, @quintonjournals, on their exact anniversaries (see the feed on the right hand side of this site); for another, a number of perfectly serviceable outline accounts can be found online. Those seeking more detail ought to get hold of Frank Fox’s brilliant study, The Four Days’ Battle of 1666 – a fine exemplar of how all accounts of naval battles ought to be written. However, the battle formed the basis of the fifth Quinton novel, The Battle of All The Ages, so, to honour the memories of those who fell on both sides, here are some extracts from that.

 

From the ‘Historical Note’

The plot of The Battle of All The Ages is centred on the longest, as well as one of the largest and hardest, sea battles in the entire age of sail. Between 1 and 4 June 1666, the British fleet under George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, and Prince Rupert of the Rhine, fought a colossal duel in the North Sea against the Dutch fleet under Michiel Adrianszoon De Ruyter, the Netherlands’ greatest admiral. The British were weakened by the fact that Rupert had been detached to confront a French threat believed to be approaching from the west, but when it was clear that this decision had been based on false intelligence, he was recalled and rejoined Albemarle on the third day. The battle featured some remarkable individual events, such as the loss of the huge flagship Royal Prince (her commander, Sir George Ayscue, remains the only British admiral ever to have surrendered in action) and the suicidal attack by Sir William Berkeley and his Swiftsure. It is also one of the best illustrated naval battles of all time: the famous Dutch marine artist Willem van de Velde the elder was present, sketching from a boat throughout the action, and his drawings, now preserved principally at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and the Boymans – Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, formed an invaluable research resource for this book. The British fleet was ultimately defeated and forced to retreat into the Thames, having suffered the worst attrition rate among commanding officers in the entire history of the Royal Navy, before or since. But in an astonishing feat by seventeenth century standards, the dockyards repaired the shattered ships and got the fleet back to sea within seven weeks, where they inflicted a defeat on the Dutch during the St James’ Day fight.

 

The Opening Scene of the Book

‘Eighty-one. Eighty-two. Eighty-three. Eighty-four. Eighty-five. Eighty-six.’ Lieutenant Christopher Farrell lowered his telescope and turned to look directly at me. ‘They outnumber us by thirty, Sir Matthew.’

The horizon to the east-south-east was filled with hulls and sails. The metal-grey sea was rough, whipped up by a strong, warm, blustery south-westerly breeze; Kit Farrell had seemed to take an eternity to count the number of ships opposing us, for the distant vessels kept vanishing behind the swell. Even so, I could still make out the colours flying from the enemy’s ensign staffs and topmasts. The Dutch colours.

‘For a fleet that’s supposed still to be in harbour, they seem quite remarkably seaborne,’ I said sarcastically. ‘God bless our spies in Holland, who are paid so well for their invaluable intelligence.’

‘Forgive the ignorance of a landsman, Sir Matthew,’ said the youth at my side, in a tone at once haughty and irreverent, ‘but if the enemy outnumbers our fleet so heavily, why are we advancing toward it? Why are we not withdrawing discreetly into the safety of the Thames? Why are we, if I may be so bold as to venture the word, attacking?’

‘Because, My Lord,’ I began, ‘His Grace –‘

‘Because,’ interrupted Phineas Musk, the barrel-shaped, bald creature who served nominally as my clerk, ‘His Grace the Duke of Albemarle, that was General Monck, that was the man who restored the King, that is our beloved general-at-sea – His Grace thinks as highly of the Dutch as he does of a dog-turd on the sole of his shoe. If he was out alone in a row-boat against the fleet yonder, he’d still consider the odds to be in his favour. My Lord.’

I scowled at Musk; such sentiments ought not to be expressed loudly upon the quarterdeck, where various mates and topmen could hear them. But Musk, an ancient retainer of the Quinton family, had somehow acquired the sort of licence that kings once gave their court jesters. He spoke the brutal truths that most men preferred to dissemble, and seemed perfectly impervious to any reprimand. Besides, he was entirely correct. At the council-of-war two days previously, I myself had heard the obese old Duke of Albemarle’s contemptuous dismissal of our Dutch enemy, uttered in his broad Devon brogue: ‘A land of atheistical cheese-mongers wallowing in bog-mud, gentlemen. Cowards to a man. One good English broadside and they’ll run for home, shitting themselves in fright.’ The Duke’s confidence seemed not to have been shaken a jot by the loss of nearly a third of his fleet, despatched west under his joint general-at-sea, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, to intercept the French fleet that was reported to be coming up the Channel to join its Dutch allies, or else perhaps to stop the French invading Ireland, or Wales, or the Isle of Wight; no man seemed entirely certain what the French were meant to be doing, which was ominous. The prince had been recalled, but God knew where he was, or how long it would take his ships to return.

‘Ah yes,’ said my young companion, ‘His Grace. Never was the ducal address of honour so inappropriate. Was there ever such an ungraceful Duke in England as poor, fat old Georgie Monck?’

I frowned. There were men within earshot, and it did not do for them to hear their betters denigrating those who were better still. But I could say nothing. The lad was an Earl, and I was merely the brother and heir to an Earl. He was also given a quite remarkable degree of licence by the King, and, it was said, an even more remarkable degree of it by virtually every woman in London, from bawds to baronesses. By many of the men, too, allegedly; and, as some would have it, even by some of the animals. It was no surprise that his eyes were already old and tired, with bags beneath them that bore witness to far too many debauches. His shirt was open to the waist: to emulate the seamen, he claimed, though few of them were so underdressed in such a strong breeze, and none wore shirts of the finest silk. I suspected that the young man’s display of his bare chest might have been prompted by other, and rather baser, considerations. For this was John Wilmot, the young Earl of Rochester, come to sea as a volunteer on my ship, so that he could demonstrate his bravery to – well, it was not entirely clear which of his recent amours of any gender or species he was meant to be demonstrating it to. His father and my brother, the enigmatic Earl of Ravensden, had been friends and allies in exile, forever plotting to overthrow Cromwell and restore King Charles to his throne, and this connection proved sufficient to place the poetically-inclined young Earl aboard my ship. In a moment of weakness, I even agreed that My Lord could bring with him his pet monkey, an astonishingly evil creature that now gazed at me malevolently from its favoured perch in the mizzen shrouds.

[Note: the notorious Restoration libertine, Rochester, really did serve in the Four Days Battle]

 

Abraham Storck, the Four Days Battle of 1666
Abraham Storck, the Four Days Battle of 1666

The Fate of Berkeley and the Swiftsure

A shout from the lookout at the maintop – a great, deep noise, then the sound of rope and canvas tearing apart –

I ran to the other side of the quarterdeck, taking my telescope from Kellett.

‘What is it, Sir Matthew?’ Rochester demanded.

‘Look yonder, My Lord. There, in the Dutch line. Two of them have collided! Great God – one of them is Tromp himself!’

It was an astonishing sight: two mighty men-of-war locked together, their rigging entangled, the bows of the one wedged onto the bow of the other. Even as we watched, the mainmast of Tromp’s flagship Hollandia came down, taking her tricolour command flag with it. Yet again, good fortune seemed to be carrying the battle the way of the English – or as Musk had put it, turning everything topsy-turvy in the blink of an eye. Collision is always a real possibility in a sea-fight, for ships are often sailing very close to each other; and the Dutch were unaccustomed to the line-of-battle, where each ship was meant to keep station only a very short distance from those ahead or astern of it, to give an enemy no room to break through gaps in the line. But the collision of the two great ships – Tromp’s Hollandia and the Leifde, as we later learned – meant that they were falling away to leeward, helplessly entangled. Thus there was not just a gap in the Dutch line, but a huge, gaping, tempting passageway. An empty avenue of sea presented itself, stretching away to the irresistible target at the end of it, exposed and unable to manoeuvre. The Hollandia. The great Admiral Tromp himself.

‘The Vice-Admiral, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit, pointing ahead and slightly to larboard.

The Swiftsure, with the white command flag streaming from her foretop, was adjusting sail and beginning to fall down with the wind, making for the gap and the crippled Hollandia. Will Berkeley was intent on redeeming himself in the eyes of Albemarle, the fleet and the kingdom. Will was sailing to seize or destroy Tromp.

 

***

‘Your orders, Sir Matthew?’ asked Hardy, the Royal Sceptre’s master.

I said nothing, instead scanning as much of the battle as I could see with my telescope. Will’s opportunity was obvious, but so too was the terrible risk he was taking. He had to get up to Tromp before the Dutch could bring down enough reinforcements to seal the gap in the line. With far fewer ships at his disposal, Albemarle could not similarly reinforce Will, even if he was so inclined. The general was still heavily engaged against De Ruyter, and now there was a new threat. Through the smoke and the great melee of masts, sails and hulls, I caught glimpses of our Blue squadron, in the Rear. But now there were Dutch flags to the west of the Blue – in other words, to windward. The Dutch rear divisions, strengthened by the ships that had been out of action to the north, but which were now coming into action almost by the minute, had broken through the Blue and gained the weather gage. If Albemarle was going to redeploy his ships in the centre to reinforce anywhere, it would have to be there.  And that meant Will Berkeley’s charge at Tromp, unsupported, was likely to be suicidal.

‘Your orders, Sir Matthew?’ Hardy repeated, with a more obvious note of urgency in his voice.

My Royal Sceptre was the Swiftsure’s second. Under the fleet’s orders, and by naval tradition from time immemorial, the second supported the flagship of its division. Will Berkeley was one of my dearest and best friends. Every bone in my body, every feeling in my heart, every last shred of my sense of honour, screamed out the order to go to his aid. But my head knew full well that without further reinforcement, following in Will Berkeley’s wake was simply insane. We and the remaining ships of Will’s Vice-Admiral’s division were too few on our own. If we sailed after our flagship, unsupported – and as the senior captain remaining, I would have to give that order – there was a strong likelihood that we would be overwhelmed. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the men aboard the King’s Prick and the other ships of our division would be slaughtered. And given the existing disparity in numbers between the fleets, the loss of the six remaining ships of the Vice-Admiral’s division of the White Squadron would almost certainly lose us the battle. No other ships of our fleet showed the slightest sign of sailing to support the Swiftsure or her division. A bitter thought struck me: even if there was no threat from the north, would Albemarle sail in any case to support two young gentlemen captains – representatives of a breed he detested? Even as the thought came to me, I saw the Royal Charles begin to turn into the wind and break out the blue flag at the mizzen peak, the signal for the rest of the fleet to follow in his wake. To follow west-north-west: towards the Blue Squadron, away from the Swiftsure and ourselves.

As I stood alone – desperately alone – at the larboard rail of the quarterdeck, I could see the gap in the Dutch line beginning to close. Slowly but surely, the enemy fleet was swallowing the Swiftsure. Will Berkeley was sailing to his fate, whatever that was to be.

‘Your orders, Sir Matthew?’ demanded Hardy, for a third time.

I could barely speak the words I had to speak, such was the unutterable guilt, grief and sense of dishonour that coursed through me.

‘We tack to follow the general,’ I said.


The Second Day of the Battle

I have a good memory for a man of my years. Indeed, it is usually significantly better than the memories of those who are barely a quarter of my age: in these days when almost the whole of England is awash on a sea of gin, even young men seem incapable by dinner of remembering what they had for breakfast. But when it comes to the precise order of events on that second day of the battle, I can chiefly recall only fragments of memories, and they come above all from flashes of the senses, from sight, smell and sound.

The little ships of both fleets – the yachts, galliots and the like – dashing hither and thither between the great hulls, fighting their own vicious miniature battles.

The sea carpeted with fallen masts and sails, interspersed with the bloated bodies of dead men.

The stench of gunsmoke, which hung over the battle like a shroud, the winds too light to disperse it: so thick at times that we could barely identify the nationality of the ship we were firing at, or see our own forecastle from the quarterdeck.

The men at the guns, stripped to the waists, sweat pouring down their bodies as the muzzles got ever hotter. The sun beating down relentlessly, its shafts sometimes piercing the smoke to cast a strange, ghostly light upon our decks.

The roaring of the great guns. The shock of their blast, striking one as hard as a punch in the chest. The sounds of the different types of shot as they sped through the air. The firing of muskets, with the pop of matchlocks contrasting with the sharper sound of the newer flintlocks. The shrill blast of officers’ whistles. The cracking of timber as masts, yards and hulls splintered. The screams of men in their death throes, and of the wounded being carried down to the surgeon’s cockpit. My own voice, hoarse from shouting orders and exhortations all day long. My swordarm, painful from having the heavy weapon in hand for hours on end.

Pass the Dutch on opposite but parallel courses, fire three or four mighty broadsides, try to break through their line and prevent them breaking through ours, tack, rest and repair in the interval, pass each other again, repeated over and over throughout the day, God knows how many times – even soon after the battle, some men were prepared to swear on their mothers’ graves that we and they had passed five times, others said seven, others nine.

At one point, we thought we had won. Tromp and his squadron somehow became detached from the rest of the Dutch fleet and were lying to leeward, in the east, with our Red Squadron pouring down onto them. Fresh Holles, the charming rogue who later became a friend of sorts, once told me of it, as we sat drinking wine in the Southwark George:

'Holmes wearing that ludicrous turban...' National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
‘Holmes wearing that ludicrous turban…’ National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

‘We had them, Matt. I’d taken the Spiegel with my Antelope – we’d set the Liefde on fire – two of their biggest ships, and we were pressing Tromp himself. We’d have won the war there and then, that afternoon, if you and the White had come to our aid. We saw the Prince coming up, the rest of you behind her. But did that old woman Ayscue come down to support us? No, he and the rest of you sailed merrily by –‘

‘Hardly fair, Fresh. There was another Dutch squadron to windward of us. If we’d moved to support you, they’d have split our fleet in two, isolating the Blue.’

‘Stuff, Matt Quinton. Stuff, I say. A bold admiral would have been able to overwhelm Tromp before their other ships could move. As it was – well, you know what happened. The great De Ruyter himself smashes through our line and rescues Tromp. Now he knows what boldness means, that man. Not that I witnessed it, of course, because that was just after they blew my fucking arm off.’

Holles raised his glass to his lips with his right, and sole remaining, hand.

‘You got a knighthood out of it, Sir Frescheville. And old Lely’s painting of you and Rob Holmes wouldn’t have been as fetching if you still had the other arm.’

‘Fetching? You think it’s fetching, with Holmes wearing that ludicrous turban? You have damned strange tastes in art, Matt Quinton.’

 

The ‘Butcher’s Bill’ of the British Fleet in the Four Days Battle

Officers Slaine and Wounded:

Captains Whitty of the Vanguard, Wood of the Henrietta, Bacon of the Bristol, Mootham of the Princess, Terne of the Triumph, Reeves of the Essex, Chappell of the Clove Tree, Dare of the House of Sweeds, Coppin of the St George,  all slaine.

Sir William Clarke, secretary to His Grace of Albemarle, slaine.

Sir Christopher Myngs, maimed, and since dead.

Captain Holles, his arm shot off.

Captain Miller, his leg shot off, since dead.

Captain Gethings, drowned.

Captains Jennens and Fortescue, maimed; Harman, hurt by the fall of a mast; Pearce, Earle, Silver and Holmes, all wounded

Sir George Ayscue, prisoner in Holland.

Sir William Berkeley of the Swiftsure, perhaps prisoner in Holland, perhaps slaine.

Lost on our side, 6,000 men.

 

Adapted from ‘A Particular Account of the Last Engagement between the Dutch and English, June 1666’: Bodleian Library, Oxford

The Real Gentlemen Captains, Redux, Part I

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In the lead-up to my appearance on 13 March at Weymouth Leviathan, Britain’s first maritime literary festival, I thought I’d reblog some of my very earliest posts on this site, from November 2011, about some of the characters who will be making appearances during my talk. Here’s the first of them!

People often ask me to what extent the characters in the Quinton Journals, especially Matthew himself, are based on real people. I thought I’d use my next few blog posts to introduce some of the real-life individuals whose careers in Charles II’s navy provided the inspiration for Matthew and some of his adventures; and yes, occasionally the lives of these officers provide a few clues to some of the story lines in future books of the series! In future blogs I’ll also go on to detail some of the ‘tarpaulin’ officers who provided the inspiration for the character and career of Kit Farrell.

Captain Francis Digby – Probably born in about 1645, he was the second son of George Digby, second Earl of Bristol, one of Charles I’s most important (if catastrophic) advisors during the Civil War. He went to sea just after the Restoration, aged about fifteen, and fought at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665 as a volunteer with Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red Squadron. In March 1666 he became lieutenant of the flagship Royal Charles, and his good service in that role during the Four Days Battle at the beginning of June led to his promotion to captain of the Fourth Rate frigate Jersey. His bravery is indicated by the fact that when the Jersey went in for repair after the St James’s day fight, Digby asked permission to go back to sea on another ship as a volunteer (a request rejected by the admiral, the grumpy old Duke of Albemarle). In 1667 he commanded the frigate Greenwich, which seems to have been given to him by King Charles II principally as a means of trying to restore the Digby family fortune, which had been ruined by the civil war. In 1668-9 he commanded the Third Rate Mountague in the Mediterranean. Digby’s manuscript journal for these commands, preserved at the British Library, reveals that despite his aristocratic background, he gradually became a highly competent seaman; on one occasion only his quick thinking prevented the fleet being wrecked on the North African coast.

Digby spent March and April 1672 in France, ‘fine tuning’ the naval agreement by which a combined Anglo-French fleet would attack the Dutch to fulfil the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover (1670). Digby met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and during the next few days had several meetings with the king’s chief minister, Colbert. Not surprisingly the French rejected out of hand Digby’s suggestion that their captains and ships should have English commissions and colours, on the grounds that ‘his Christian Majesty never could suffer his captains to take commissions but from himself’. Despite this and some other disagreements, Digby’s negotiations were complete by 12 March. After leaving Paris he undertook a tour of inspection to Brest and La Rochelle before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry. Digby was apparently somewhat disappointed by this, believing that he was already qualified to be a flag officer; indeed, if he had lived there is little doubt that he would have been an admiral before the end of the third Anglo-Dutch war, as several men junior to him were promoted to such rank during it. But on 28 May 1672 the Dutch under Michiel De Ruyter launched a surprise pre-emptive attack on the Anglo-French fleet as it lay in Solebay. The Henry was in the admiral’s division of the Blue Squadron, which bore the brunt of the fighting; the flagship Royal James was burned by a fireship and her admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, killed. The Henry had the next highest number of casualties in the squadron, with 49 killed. Francis Digby was one of them. He was buried at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, the mausoleum of the Russell family, Earls and later Dukes of Bedford; his mother was a daughter of the fourth Earl.

Digby was one of the many suitors of Frances Stuart, the model for the original image of ‘Britannia’ and later the Duchess of Richmond. Digby’s pursuit of her, like King Charles’s own, proved to be hopeless. He was said to have been driven to distraction by her ‘cruelty’, and after his death at Solebay Dryden wrote ‘Farewell, Fair Armida’, a poignant epitaph to unrequited love:

Farewell, fair Armida, my joy and my grief!
In vain I have loved you, and hope no relief;
Undone by your virtue, too strict and severe,
Your eyes gave me love, and you gave me despair:
Now called by my honour, I seek with content
The fate which in pity you would not prevent:
To languish in love were to find, by delay,
A death that’s more welcome the speediest way.
On seas and in battles, in bullets and fire,
The danger is less than in hopeless desire;
My death’s wound you give me, though far off I bear
My fall from your sight—not to cost you a tear:
But if the kind flood on a wave should convey,
And under your window my body should lay,
The wound on my breast when you happen to see,
You’ll say with a sigh—it was given by me.

The Rage is Coming!

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Cue drum roll…cue trumpets…

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that the next ‘Journal of Matthew Quinton’, the sixth book in the series, will be entitled The Rage of Fortune.

But this is a ‘Quinton Journal’ with a twist, because the central character is a different Matthew Quinton. Followers of the series will know that one of the biggest influences on the personality of my hero, the Restoration naval captain Matthew Quinton, is the memory of his eponymous grandfather, the eighth Earl of Ravensden, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s ‘sea dogs’. Indeed, Matthew sometimes ‘hears’ asides from what might or might not be the shade of the long-dead swashbuckler, a colleague and rival of the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. I’d always envisaged a prequel centring on the first Matthew Quinton, and thanks to Ben Yarde-Buller at Old Street Publishing, I’ve now got the opportunity to do it!

The story begins in 1651, just after the Battle of Worcester, the final conflict of the British Civil Wars. The eleven year old Matthew Junior and his twin, Henrietta, are exploring an abandoned corner of their family home when they discover the long-forgotten papers of their grandfather, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Roundhead troops intent on searching for their elder brother, the tenth Earl of Ravensden, who has been seriously wounded in the Cavalier cause. Gradually, though, the papers of the old Earl and of some of those who knew him – including the recollections of his wife, Matt and Herry’s grandmother – start to paint a picture of a very different world: the world of the turn of the seventeenth century, when England was still fighting a seemingly endless war against Spain, when William Shakespeare was writing Henry V and Julius Caesar, and when the whole country was obsessed by the question of who would succeed the ageing Queen Elizabeth.

The Rage of Fortune is set against the backdrop of a series of real historical events. Many still wrongly assume that the Spanish Armada was the only significant naval campaign during Elizabeth I’s war, and that nothing of much note happened after it. This is simply untrue – the war lasted for another 16 years, and Rage places Earl Matthew at the centre of such remarkable, but sadly little known, naval actions as the affairs of the ‘Spinola Galleys’ and the ‘Invisible Armada’, and at the Battles of Castlehaven, Kinsale and Sesimbra Bay. Meanwhile, he and his new French wife are thrust into the heart of the intrigues over the succession to the English throne and of one of the most mysterious incidents in the whole of British history, while being threatened by a mysterious and malevolent enemy who threatens to bring down the entire Quinton family. Rage also provides a startling revelation about the history of one of the principal characters from the Restoration-era books!

I’ve really enjoyed returning to a time period and to themes that I know well. I spent over ten years researching and writing my non-fiction book, Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens, and the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’, which provided a lot of inspiration and material for The Rage of Fortune; and I spent many more years teaching Elizabethan and Jacobean England, together with such related European History themes as the French Wars of Religion, Habsburg Spain, and the Revolt of the Netherlands (all touched upon in Rage), to A-level students. So in some ways, writing The Rage of Fortune has marked a return to pastures old! But I’ve also relished the opportunity to learn more about matters that I’d been only dimly aware of until now: for instance, the very brief and somewhat bizarre interlude when both England and the Netherlands became convinced, almost literally overnight, that galleys were the future of naval warfare, even in stormy northern waters, and embarked on programmes of galley-building.

Regular readers of the series will already have come across references in Matthew Junior’s ‘back story’ to some of the other characters who appear in The Rage of Fortune: notably to his grandmother, the ‘imperious termagant’ Louise-Marie, Countess of Ravensden, a distinctly feisty Frenchwoman, twenty years younger than her husband, and to his remarkably long-lived great-great-grandmother Katherine, a former nun. And those regular readers needn’t fear – Matthew Junior will be back in his own right in 2016, the 350th anniversary of both the Four Days Battle (the subject of the most recent published title in the series, The Battle of All The Ages) and of the Great Fire of London, which will play a very significant part in the plot of ‘Quinton 7’, Death’s Bright Angel. 

The Rage of Fortune will be published by Old Street Publishing in the spring or summer of 2015. I really hope that readers enjoy it!

Kernow bys vyken!

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Cornwall has had something of a mixed week.

On the plus side, there was the government’s decision to grant it national minority status. Now, whatever the legalistic merits or demerits of such status, there’s no doubt that Cornwall is, and always has been, a very different place. That was immediately apparent to me after I moved down there in 1979 to begin my first teaching job, at a school in Newquay. (We had a high truancy rate during the summer, but at least we know where everyone was: they’d be surfing on Fistral Beach. And that was just the senior management team.) As I wrote in a previous post, if my three years there taught me anything (apart from the fact that a pint of Guinness and Lucozade is a viable drink), it’s just how ferociously independent the Cornish are; a Cornwall vs Gloucestershire rugby match at, say, Camborne’s tightly packed old ground, is treated essentially as an international, with black and white St Piran’s flags waving everywhere and the strains of the ‘national anthem’, Trelawny, echoing from the terraces. There was the language, too, still all pervasive in place names and surnames (as my first class registers quickly demonstrated). Much of the language was actually quite familiar, as Cornish is very similar to Welsh, and I swiftly learned the single most important Cornish phrase of all – ‘non emmett’, literally ‘not an ant’, intended as ‘I’m not a tourist’ or, more pointedly, ‘Not English’. As readers of the Quinton Journals will probably know, I provided Matthew Quinton with a somewhat obstreporous Cornish crew in part as a tribute to the time I spent living west of the Tamar, and the names of several of them were drawn from former students, colleagues or acquaintances. I’ve also tried to work in snippets of the Cornish language from time to time – the latest book, The Battle of All The Ages, includes the first lines of the Lord’s Prayer in Cornish – while Gentleman Captain has a poignant funeral scene which culminates in the singing of the lovely old Cornish song, The White Rose.

Charlestown, Cornwall - my kind of harbour
Charlestown, Cornwall – my kind of harbour

But then, on the minus side, there was the BBC’s adaptation of Jamaica Inn. Auntie must have thought that this would tick all the boxes for prime time Easter viewing. Excellent cast acting their socks off? Check. Former Downton Abbey star? Check. Glorious scenery on Bodmin Moor? Check. Strong story by a bankable name, i.e. Daphne du Maurier? Check. And then it all went terribly wrong, with a torrent of complaints from viewers who simply couldn’t understand what the cast were saying. The Beeb grovelled, assuring the world that it was a problem with sound levels and not that the actors were mumbling. So the ‘sound levels’ were adjusted…and the complaints continued. But let’s be honest, shall we, all you Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells who complained to the BBC about the ‘sound levels’ on Jamaica Inn? Yes, some of the cast were mumbling, and no doubt the Beeb finds it easier to blame anonymous backroom techies than highly paid, precious luvvies delivering ‘naturalistic’ (aka unintelligible) performances. But on the whole, it seemed to me that there was nothing seriously wrong with the sound levels, or even with much of the delivery. Isn’t it more likely that many of you simply couldn’t understand the ‘Cornish’ / generic Mummerzetshire accents that the cast had adopted, but were too polite or nervous to say so? After all, these days complaining about ‘unintelligible’ accents is akin to being labelled a racist: and as a Welshman who still has to smile tolerantly at people’s ‘witty’ stabs at cod Welsh accents, which invariably come out as more akin to Bangalore than Bangor, I’d respectfully contend that I know what I’m talking about.

Before one could eat a pasty or a cream tea, the critics of mumbling had been joined by the historical accuracy brigade. Aargh, it’s the wrong type of plough / coach / hymn! They’re not reloading their pistols before firing them again!! It was interesting that these criticisms focused overwhelmingly on the terrestrial aspects: perhaps it’s a sign of Britain’s apparent ‘sea-blindness’ these days that few people seem to have picked up on the rather more fundamental plot holes in the maritime aspects of the story, e.g. how a crewman of a sailing ship in 1821 could guarantee that his vessel would depart exactly at a given time on a given day, or why wreckers would choose to operate in broad daylight, for goodness sake. Those who actually know the geography of Cornwall might also have boggled at some of the journey times implicit in the story: Jamaica Inn to the coast = short stroll over adjacent hill, rather than the actual distance, namely six or seven miles; getting from Launceston Gaol to Roughtor = quarter of an hour, tops (good luck with that one in a Formula One car, let alone on horseback). Of course, the BBC will respond by pleading dramatic licence, and I’ve used enough of that myself to sympathise, but there’s a very fine line between dramatic licence and laughably implausible, which itself is merely a fine line away from just plain wrong.

But all of this is really a very long-winded preamble to a plug for my appearance at the Penzance Literary Festival in July – to be precise, at 11.00 on Friday 18 July. I’m talking on Cornwall in naval history and naval fiction, so will be touching on the stories of the likes of Sir Richard Grenville and the Pellew brothers, as well as fictitious characters like Alexander Kent’s Bolitho and, yes, Matthew Quinton’s Cornish crew. It should be great fun, and if any of you are going to be in the area and fancy coming along, it would be terrific to meet you. While I’m down there, I’ll also look forward to a rare chance to revisit some of my old stomping grounds – maybe even ordering a pint of Guinness and Lucozade in the Jamaica Inn itself, and acknowledging receipt of same with a cheery ‘Proper job, me ‘ansum!’.

(And for those who don’t know, ‘Kernow bys vyken’ means ‘Cornwall for ever’. Matthew Quinton’s men shout it as a battle cry in The Blast That Tears The Skies, and will do so again!)