The Lion of Midnight, page 2
Yet news of the arrival of a fabulously laden Dutch return-fleet from the East Indies had fired anew the king’s enthusiasm for the war. A squadron under Sir Thomas Teddiman was detached to intercept them in the harbour of Bergen, an accommodation to such effect having been made with the ruler of that neutral shore, the King of Denmark. Or so monarch, ministers and mariners erroneously believed – right up to the moment when the guns of Bergen opened fire on Teddiman’s ships. In the aftermath of the battle, King Frederik denied knowledge of any prior accommodation with his cousin King Charles. Instead, he protested against a foul and unprovoked invasion of his territory, and prepared for war against our Britannic kingdoms. He was joined in this course by a far grander potentate: the Most Christian King Louis the Fourteenth of France, no longer able to avoid the inconvenient terms of a treaty of mutual defence that he had concluded with the Dutch some years earlier. That, then, was the most unhappy situation of England, and of those of us upon the quarterdeck of the Cressy, in those early months of the happy new year of 1666: as not a few pointed out, the date that contained the Number of the Beast. England was at war, or soon would be, with the entire coast of Europe from the Arctic to the Pyrenees, apart from a pitifully few miles of German and Flemish beach,
I looked away from Lord Conisbrough toward the menacing shape of the great Danish warship.
‘My orders enjoin me to avoid conflict with the Danes if it can be avoided,’ I said. ‘But if the Danish captain wishes it, I will give him battle.’
My confidence was born of calculation. The more I considered the odds, the more firmly I came to believe that we could at least hold our own. We were smaller, but that would give us the advantage in manoeuvring in these confined waters. I would wager my fortune (not that it was substantial) upon my gun crews being able to outshoot the Danes; the Cressys were all volunteers, veterans of the previous summer’s campaign and in some cases of the previous Dutch war too, whereas the Danes would have less experience and would all have been recruited very recently – since the debacle at Bergen – so the crew facing us was bound to be new and untried. And yet they knew these waters, and we did not. If the Cressy grounded upon an uncharted rock, even the least experienced gun crews on earth could batter us into matchwood at their leisure.
I do not know if Conisbrough was contemplating the same contingencies. He certainly studied the Danish ship intently for some moments, exchanged a glance with his page boy, and then turned to me. ‘If I may, Sir Matthew, I believe I should make the visit to the Danish captain and seek to reach an accommodation with him. I speak their language well enough.’ My face must have betrayed my bemusement. Conisbrough seemed to weigh his next words with especial care: ‘My name also has a certain repute in these parts, Sir Matthew. It may not be without value.’
I weighed the issue. I had no idea of the basis for Conisbrough’s strange boast, but surely it could do no harm to send him over to the Danish ship in triple harness with Kit and Jeary? The latter could report what he and the captain said to each other, while a peer of the realm might prove a useful buttress to Kit’s authority as a commissioned officer of the King of England.
It was only much later, as the rotund and hospitable Captain Jan-Ulrik Rohde entertained us all in the great cabin of the Oldenborg, that I realised my mistake. Jeary reported that the first few sentences Rohde and Conisbrough had spoken to each other were in Danish, but thereafter they spoke exclusively in French. And neither my ship’s master nor my lieutenant spoke that tongue, which I myself spoke with a fluency learned at the knee of a grandmother born and bred in the Val de Loire. Even so, the upshot seemed evident enough. Rohde confirmed that King Frederik had not yet formally declared war, and thus we had good enough reason to avoid hostilities here, in our tiny corner of the Norwegian sea. He even offered the Cressy a pilot, a local man of Flackery, but both Jeary and the Trinity House that had certified him competent for the voyage were confident that our master could guide us safely through the maze of islands and onto a true course for Gothenburg. Captain Rohde made a jest of it, hinting that I was fearful he was going to fob off upon me some madman who would run us onto the rocks. Thus we parted in good humour, and I prayed that the duplicity of kings would not soon make us enemies.
* * *
I was in my seabed, rocked by the motion of the moderating deep, trying to sleep but recollecting the day’s events.
Consider my Lord of Conisbrough, my restless thoughts demanded. A mere passenger, bound for Sweden solely to assess the wellbeing of his estates? A mere passenger, whose very name and word seemed able to prevent a fight to the death between the Cressy and one of the King of Denmark’s mightiest vessels? We, your restless thoughts, think not, Sir Matthew Quinton. And now let us consider the words of Kit Farrell, words forgotten until the tolling of the ship’s bell proclaims it to be one of the clock. ‘A three-decker. At sea in February.’ Aye, Kit, rare indeed. In England, to see a three-decker upon the brine before April is as rare as a sighting of the unicorn.
Upon that thought I rose, wiped sleep from my tired eyes, and walked to the great stern window. After a few moments, I became accustomed to the light and made out the hull of the Oldenborg, black and brooding upon the dark waters. The Danes were moving one of their greatest men-of-war during the depth of winter, a time when no realm ever sent its great ships to sea. One of the ships from Kristiansand, Kit had said, presumably moving down to Frederikshavn or Copenhagen to join the rest of King Frederik’s fleet. True, the fact that she was more lightly armed than an English ship of her size made her more seaworthy in such a season, but that did not materially alter the case.
I stood until our bell rang again, taking in the full knowledge of what lay in front of my eyes.
Thanks to Conisbrough, we had no war today. But as God was my judge, the very fact of the Oldenborg’s presence there, fully manned and fully gunned, meant that war with the Dane was coming. Add that to our war with the Dutch, and our war with the French, and as I stood upon the deck of my cabin in the Cressy, it seemed easy to believe that all too soon, we would be at war with all the world.
Chapter Two
Moses tells us that the span allotted to a man is threescore years and ten.
I, who have long surpassed that ideal, can testify that this is but the blinking of an eye. Yet how astonishing will it seem to future generations that almost entirely within my own lifetime, a great empire rose, flowered and perished? Why, even now there are young blades who find it inconceivable that barely twenty years ago, there was a glory and a legend that bore one name: Sweden. This land of rock and forest on the edge of Europe, where the sun for months on end never deigns to shine; this kingdom with few resources and less money; this realm of few people, and they made mad by cold and darkness – this same nation once bestrode Europe like a colossus. As a child, I learned and was enthralled by the tales of the hero-king Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of Midnight, who conquered half of Germany, terrorised the Holy Roman Emperor and petrified the Pope before falling at the moment of his greatest victory. As a boy, I was intrigued by the myths and scandals attached to the name of his daughter Christina, the scholar-queen who favoured men’s attire and finally gave up her throne for the love, not of a man, but of the abstract theology that some men call Popery. As a young man I idolised her successor Karl the Tenth, who marched an entire army across a frozen sea to crush Denmark and won vast swathes of new territory for the Three Crowns of the Swedes, Goths and Wends. And so the Swedish empire rose, driven by the Gothic legend that they, the Swedes, were invincible, and their Lion of Midnight would return to sweep popery and ignorance into the sea, bringing a new age of enlightenment to Europe. How incredible it seems now, even so few years after that entire empire crumbled to dust. Yet then, in the winter of 1666, the Sweden into whose waters the Cressy sailed was at the height of her power and fame, her armies and fortresses ringing the Baltic from Bremen to Finland, her sword-won territories controlling every great river that flowed from Germany into that sea.
We made our landfall at the isle of Wingo, upon which stood the beacon marking the entrance to the road of Gothenburg. With the wind at west-by-north, Jeary took us a little to the south and then due east for the small, low islet of Grytan, whence we turned north by east through the sea-gate. Stretching away to both starboard and larboard was a myriad of islands, some large, others little more than rocks. Many were dotted with rough fishermen’s huts; here and there castles stood upon promontories, high-towered affairs with lofty pinnacles, so unlike our squat English fortresses. Every piece of land we could see was crowned with a thick covering of snow. The archipelago reminded me greatly of the western coast of Scotland, where I had finally confronted my destiny as a seaman. A few hardy fishermen were out in their little craft, and a large Lubecker passed us on the opposite tack when we were off the island of Branno, but otherwise the sea was empty. Few merchants would imperil their precious cargoes in a frozen, storm-wracked February, and the two principal nations who commonly plied these waters, ourselves and the Dutch, were at war with each other, multiplying the risks and thus the insurance costs. Since leaving Flackery we had sighted several small Dutch capers, optimistic privateering craft whose captains had evidently put to sea in the hope that some English skipper or other would be foolhardy enough to try and run home from Gothenburg before the spring. How their hearts must have sunk at the sight of the vast Cressy!
We made our way slowly through the archipelago. Here again, Jeary was confident enough in his knowledge of these waters to reckon we could dispense with the services of a pilot, although the busy throng of little craft that started to ply around us as we approached Gothenburg begged to differ. Each claimed to offer the services of the finest pilot in West Sweden, derided our folly in navigating these waters without his services, and proclaimed that we would certainly come to grief on any of the vast rocks that had mysteriously come into being since our charts were drawn.
I surveyed the scene from the quarterdeck, content to leave the conning of the ship entirely to Jeary. Phineas Musk and Lord Conisbrough were alongside me, looking out onto what for the noble lord was clearly a familiar spectacle: he named this island and that castle, identifying the owners of many of them. A surprising number seemed still to be the property of the former queen, Christina, whose abdication had evidently not condemned her to poverty. At length, I asked Conisbrough what I might expect in Gothenburg. After all, God alone knew when we would find a conjunction of wind and tide that would permit us to put to sea with an entire mast-fleet of eight ships, even if that fleet were ready to sail at a moment’s notice – and knowing the nature of our English ship-masters and seamen, I doubted if that would be the case.
Conisbrough looked across to the distant shore of the mainland, a rocky strand of jagged cliffs and hills. For such a vast man, the eyes set within his ugly face were remarkably small, the eyebrows almost feminine. ‘Gothenburg is a viper’s nest,’ he said slowly. ‘The Dutch and English vie against each other, waging their own private war on this foreign sod. There are Dutch inns and English ones, and woe betide any man foolish – or drunk – enough – to enter the wrong door. Like most of the city elders, the Landtshere – that is the name for a governor in this country – namely, the noble Baron Ter Horst, favours the Dutch. He is no friend of the English. His father was a Dutchman, and the entire city was built up by the Dutch, less than half a century past. But the Gothenburgers are shrewd. They know full well that the rest of Sweden detests the Dutch as being the age-old ally of the Dane, so they tread carefully. Sweden is neutral, so Gothenburg pretends to be neutral, but all know where the city’s true sympathies lie.’ Conisbrough turned to face me directly. He was a truly vast man; I was of a goodly height, one of the few men at his court able to look Charles Stuart in the eye, but I felt myself dwarfed by this hirsute titan before me. ‘But trust not too far among the English of Gothenburg, Sir Matthew,’ he continued, ‘for our race in its turn is divided between royalists and the old Commonwealths-men, the Cromwellians, and all kinds of skulking fanatics who have made the place a safe haven.’ Musk looked at him with unfeigned interest: an unexpected opportunity to crack a few round heads was suddenly opening up before him. ‘Why,’ said Conisbrough, ‘Gothenburg even harbours a regicide, who walks brazenly in the open here and does not even fear lest the wrath of King Charles might put a blade in his belly.’ Conisbrough’s speculation was not outlandish: eighteen months before, one of the fifty-nine vile traitors who signed the late king’s death warrant had been murdered at Lausanne by an Irishman shouting ‘vive le roi!’ as he pressed the pistol to the rogue’s head. Needless to say, our court (and my mother, who had her own very private reasons for detesting the regicides) had rejoiced heartily upon the tidings. ‘Then, of course, there are the Scots,’ Conisbrough said, ‘who endeavour to profit their own enterprises, regardless of the war and regardless of the purchasers.’
‘They sell to the Dutch?’ I protested.
Conisbrough nodded.
‘But that is treason!’
The noble baron smiled. ‘Your Scot has an elastic notion of treason, Sir Matthew, especially if a goodly supply of florins might be in the offing. The Scots factors in the pitch and tar trades have greatly fattened their bellies by shipping cargo after cargo to Amsterdam since this war began.’
Musk nodded in vigorous agreement; he had little love for those whom now, since the late Union, we are meant to call ‘North Britons’ and embrace as our dear neighbours.
The king would hear of this, I vowed, feeling a sense of loyal indignation at such behaviour. Thus distracted and irritated by the perfidiousness of the North Britons, I entirely overlooked the real import of what My Lord Conisbrough had told me.
‘Well then,’ I said, ‘I see I shall need to be on my guard in this Gothenburg of yours, My Lord. I pray our sailing with the mast-fleet is not unduly delayed, lest we become too embroiled in this northern Sodom.’
‘Doesn’t sound so bad,’ said Musk. ‘Sounds much like Colchester.’
‘I have not yet told you the half,’ said Conisbrough heavily. ‘There are also the Danes, resentful of the Swedes’ triumph over them in the late war and outraged by what they call our perfidy at Bergen. The city is full of them, for you know how close we are to their lands. They will seek an early blow against England to redeem the honour of their realms, you can be sure of it. And there are the Swedes themselves, of course. Their great victories have made them almost as arrogant as the French, but they have also become more peevish among themelves. Not a day goes by there without swords being drawn for and against the High Chancellor, or for and against a restoration of the late queen.’
‘The late queen? Christina?’ I said, with some surprise. ‘But she converted to Catholicism and removed herself to Rome! Can there be Swedes who favour her return?’
Conisbrough nodded. ‘She is a Vasa, of their own dynasty, unlike the German cousin to whom she resigned the crown. The child of Gustavus Adolphus, their hero king. Many will forgive her anything, even her religion, and there are even many true Lutherans who would rather see her back on the throne than the feeble dullard of a boy who occupies it now.’ As Conisbrough implied, King Karl the Tenth had died suddenly at the height of his fame but six years before, leaving a backward child of four to succeed him. ‘Indeed, some say Christina seeks just that,’ said Conisbrough. ‘You know she returned from Rome, a few years past, to assert her right to succeed young Karl if he should die? But the visit served only to remind her of how cold Sweden is. Ever since, she has not stirred from the Roman sunshine.’
Musk blew onto his hands. ‘Can’t say I blame her,’ he said.
So this was our destination. A vipers’ nest. I thought back to how grateful I had been when the Duke of York, Lord High Admiral of England, entrusted me with the command of the Cressy, one of the few ships of such size set out over the winter, as a reward for my gallant services in the previous summer’s campaign. I recalled the delight of my wife – that is, of Cornelia, Lady Quinton, a title she deployed like a First Rate – at the prospect of the pay that would accrue to me for this voyage (it being common practice for the masters of merchant ships under convoy to provide ‘gifts’ to the captain of that convoy, quite apart from the wages that His Majesty might eventually deign to pay, many months in arrears). I had envisaged an easy winter’s cruise, bringing back the mast-ships before our main fleet fitted out for the summer’s campaign. I hoped for a good command – one of the vast new Third Rates at the very least – but as a knight and the former captain of a Second Rate, albeit a small and ancient one, I might even have some expectation of hoisting my own flag. It was a notable transformation for someone who could barely have told fore from aft just five years since; but Conisbrough’s words, and our encounter with the Oldenborg, made much of my confident optimism fall away. Even setting aside all of the potential pitfalls that lurked ashore in Gothenburg, it was certain that by the time we sailed, England would be at war with Denmark, just as she was with the Dutch and the French. And I did not relish a second meeting the jovial Captain Rohde, this time at sea and with our battle-ensigns hoisted.
* * *
