The Battle of All the Ages (24 page)

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 1st and 4th 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 the
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 BoymansVan 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’s Day fight. This book follows the events and timings of the two battles very closely, although certain aspects of the sequence of events during the Four Days’ Battle, notably the bewildering series of tacks and passes on several of the days, have been simplified to prevent confusion and ennui.

Incredible as it may seem, the government of King Charles II really did base its decision to divide the fleet in part upon the intelligence from just one seaman, who had been held as a prisoner of war at La Rochelle and disastrously misinterpreted the purpose of the army that he saw being massed there. I have moved the home of this individual from Warwickshire to Plymouth for the purposes of the narrative, and have killed him most gruesomely, a fate which did not befall him in real life! Equally incredible, a gentleman captain – actually Charles Talbot of the
Elizabeth
– really did decide that the fleet he saw off Lisbon could only be that of France, despite the evidence of flags and ship design pointing to it being that of Spain, which is what it was. Again, I have relocated his ship’s landfall from Falmouth to Plymouth, but otherwise the sequence of dates of his sighting of the fleet, of despatching his letter to London, and of its appearance in the
Gazette
, complies exactly with the historical record. All in all, the sorry saga of how the fleet came to be divided in 1666 is a salutary reminder that ‘dodgy dossiers’ and the like have always been with us.

In writing this book, I have drawn above all on the work of Frank Fox. His stunning account of the battle, first published in 1996 as
A
Distant
Storm
and then in a very different format in 2009 as
The Four Days Battle of 1666
, is an example of naval history at its best. True, it is an account of a battle – now a somewhat unfashionable genre in academic circles, which are notoriously fickle – but its command of the political
and logistical realities surrounding that battle is peerless as a
demonstration
of just how such an account should be written. His reinterpretation of the causes of the division of the fleet, which I have used as the basis of Matthew’s adventures in Devon, is a classic piece of historical detective work and revisionism, shattering long-held myths through a
painstaking
analysis of the evidence. It was Frank who overturned the long-held view that Rupert was sent west to prevent a conjunction of the French and Dutch fleets, and presented incontrovertible evidence that Charles II’s ministers were driven more by alarm over the perceived threat of a French invasion of Ireland. It was also Frank who finally laid to rest the old canard about Captain Talbot’s responsibility for the division of the fleet. Best of all, though, his book is written as accessibly and
dramatically
as any novel! I’ve been fortunate to be able to call on Frank’s friendship and expertise for well over two decades, and I know very few experts in their fields who are as unstintingly generous with their time and advice. Frank also commented on early drafts of sections of this book, saving me from a number of errors and infelicities, and
demonstrated
his customary helpfulness, gentle encouragement, and precise command of the detail. Consequently, there was never any doubt at all about the identity of the dedicatee of this, the fifth journal of Matthew Quinton.

With one exception, the fictional
Royal Sceptre
’s stations and actions during the battle essentially mirror those of the
Fairfax
, a ship of almost identical force; again, I owe Frank Fox a particular debt of gratitude for suggesting to me that she would be the ideal ship for my purposes in this novel. By fictionalising her role, and making Matthew her captain, I have excised from history the valiant part played by her men and especially by her captain, Sir John Chicheley (c.1640-91). I feel a certain degree of guilt for so doing, having written the entry on Chicheley in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
. However, Chicheley has served as one the principal models for Matthew
Quinton
since I first conceived of the character. Like Matthew, he served in
the Mediterranean before the second Anglo-Dutch war; like Matthew, he held several commands in quick succession; like Matthew, he was knighted, aged twenty-five, for his outstanding conduct at the
Battle
of Lowestoft; like Matthew, he was devoted to the interests of his extended family. Unlike some of the other officers whose real lives I drew upon to create Matthew’s ‘CV’, they were even exactly the same age. Sir William Coventry, secretary to the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York, called Chicheley ‘the best of the young seamen’ of the age, which is as fine and appropriate an epitaph for him as any that I could conceive.

The one major exception to the principle of directly substituting the fictitious
Royal Sceptre
for the real
Fairfax
is the night action at the end of the first day of the Four Days’ Battle. The ship that actually fought its way through the Dutch fleet in such astonishing fashion, killing Admiral Cornelis Evertsen in the process, was Captain John Harman’s
Henry
; the part in saving her that I have assigned to Kit Farrell was played in real life by Lieutenant Thomas Lamming, who was similarly rewarded for his heroism with the command of a Fourth Rate frigate. In fact, the
Henry
’s escape was even more remarkable than the
Royal Sceptre
’s, as she successfully fought off
three
fireships, not two – but if I had faithfully replicated the third attack, it would have taken the ship much too far from the scene of the action to enable her to participate in the rest of the battle! I followed the same principle of directly
substituting
the
Royal Sceptre
for the
Fairfax
during the Saint James’s Day battle, again with just one exception: the
Tholen
was actually taken by the
Warspite
(but the flag captain of the former really was one Pieter de Mauregnault of Veere in Zeeland).

The Royal Marines date their foundation to the establishment of the Lord Admiral’s Regiment in 1664, and the force gained its first battle honours during actions like Lowestoft in 1665 and the Four Days’ Battle in 1666. Sir Peter Lely’s famous double portrait of Sir Frescheville Holles and Sir Robert Holmes, perhaps the most vivid
depiction of any of the seamen of the Restoration age, can be seen at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and on the museum’s website. Holles is shown in right profile with a cutlass in his remaining hand, Holmes in a characteristically flamboyant turban. Other
historical
characters to appear in this book include the knighted British sea-officers William Berkeley, Robert Holmes, Christopher Myngs, Edward Spragge, and, of course, the notorious libertine and poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Wilmot really did serve in the battle, albeit with Spragge, and displayed remarkable – or, as others put it, foolhardy and near-suicidal – courage under fire, although not in the way I have described it in this book. (It is not known whether Lord Rochester had a monkey in 1666, or if he did, whether it
accompanied
him to sea.) The story of the funeral of Sir Christopher Myngs is taken, nearly verbatim, from Pepys’s diary. Perhaps I have wronged Sir William Coventry by suggesting that he forgot about the men’s offer to man a fireship; but on the other hand, there is no evidence proving conclusively that the offer was ever taken up. However, there is ample evidence for the Duke of Albemarle’s hatred of gentleman captains, and for the reluctance of both the Duke and Prince Rupert to operate in a duel command.

Although I invented Captain Jacob Kranz and his
Duirel
, the
depredations
of Dutch privateers on the coasts of Britain during 1666, and the previous history of the Dunkirkers, are matters of historical record. For the former, see in particular Gijs Rommelse’s excellent account,
The Second Anglo-Dutch War
, published by Uitgeverij
Verloren
in 2006. Similarly, the character of Ludovic Conibear is fictitious, although he is based loosely on Henry Heaton, the real Navy Agent at Plymouth during the Interregnum, and on an even earlier holder of the same office, the notoriously corrupt James ‘Bottomless’ Bagge. I wrote the account of Plymouth and the navy during this period, and that on its naval agents, for the
New Maritime History of Devon
. For the history of Sir Bernard De Gomme and the construction of
the Royal Citadel at Plymouth, see Andrew Saunders’ comprehensive book,
Fortress Builder
(Exeter, 2004).

Finally, Edward Hawke, the unemployed young naval officer who appears in the Prologue, became one of the greatest British naval heroes. He won stunning triumphs at Cape Finisterre in 1747 and Quiberon Bay in 1759, the latter being described as ‘one of the supreme acts of seamanship in naval history’ (Ruddock Mackay and Michael Duffy,
Hawke, Nelson and British Naval Leadership, 1747-1805
:
Woodbridge
, 2009). Hawke died in 1781 after serving successfully as First Lord of the Admiralty and being elevated to the peerage as the first Baron Hawke. One of the truly great fighting admirals, his insistence on aggression was encapsulated in his order that no ships were to open fire until they were within pistol shot of the enemy. His example is generally recognised as having been one of the most important influences on a man who, at the time of Hawke’s death, was a precocious young post-captain of twenty-three, roughly the same age that my fictionalised Ned Hawke would have been when he presented himself before Matthew Quinton. There can be little doubt that if it really were to look down from the Elysian fields, Matthew’s shade would undoubtedly have raised many an invisible glass of nectar to the immortal memory of Horatio Nelson.

J.D. Davies
Bedfordshire
April 2014