Sword of State: The Remarkable Story of George Monck Read online

  SWORD OF STATE

  The Remarkable Story of George Monck

  Richard Woodman

  Copyright © Richard Woodman 2015

  Richard Woodman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Book One: The Forging

  PROEM: THE ENSIGN OF FOOT

  THE TOWER

  IRELAND AND MILFORD HAVEN

  POTHERIDGE

  DUNBAR

  SCOTLAND

  THE TEMPERING

  LONDON

  Book Two: The Tempering

  LONDON

  POTHERIDGE

  THE NORTH SEA

  LONDON AND POTHERIDGE

  LONDON AND SCOTLAND

  SCOTLAND

  SCOTLAND

  DALKEITH

  Author Note

  Book Three: The Wielding

  PART ONE – THE RESTORATION OF THE KING

  CHAPTER ONE – COLDSTREAM

  CHAPTER TWO – LONDON

  CHAPTER THREE – LONDON

  CHAPTER FOUR – DOVER AND CANTERBURY

  CHAPTER FIVE – LONDON

  CHAPTER SIX – LONDON

  CHAPTER SEVEN – THE NORTH SEA

  CHAPTER EIGHT – LONDON

  CHAPTER NINE – CHATHAM

  CHAPTER TEN – NEW HALL, ESSEX

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – THE COCKPIT

  SWORD OF THE STATE

  Book One: The Forging

  Table of Contents

  PROEM: THE ENSIGN OF FOOT

  THE TOWER

  IRELAND AND MILFORD HAVEN

  POTHERIDGE

  DUNBAR

  SCOTLAND

  PROEM: THE ENSIGN OF FOOT

  30 April 1670

  When did a man sense his own destiny?

  The question fastened itself in the mind of the young officer of the First Regiment of Foot Guards as he brought up the rear of his detachment in the long procession. To his immediate front marched his messmates, thirteen fellow ensigns in two ranks, the rear of which consisted of Stockman, Fielding, Lloyd, Corbet, Sands, Throgmorton and Razeby. They marched with the utmost solemnity in slow, almost comic deliberation, to the funereal thump of the muffled drums; so slow in fact that Edmund Razeby seemed likely to topple on his spindly shanks, a circumstance sensed by his fellows who suppressed their sniggers amid the hideously overwhelming grandeur of a state funeral. Not one of them had previously seen, let alone participated in, a state funeral. Now they were decked out in obsequious regard for the dead man in whose honour they paraded.

  Black baize mourning ribbons fluttered from the shoulders of their scarlet coats; their necks were wound with sable scarves and their large hats decorated with trembling ostrich feathers of the darkest hue. The citizens of London, crammed behind the red and blue lines of the Trained Bands of the County of Middlesex, crowded either side of the gravelled thoroughfare of the Strand. Emanating a faint stink, they gawped wide-eyed at the magnificence of a spectacle the like of which they had not witnessed since the Restoration procession of His Majesty King Charles II, nine years earlier, none of which would have come to pass but for the great Duke whose pompous obsequies they had turned out in their thousands to honour.

  Through the thin spring air, above the reverberating thud of the drums, the tolling of the city’s half-muffled church bells added to the lugubrious occasion. Momentarily forgetting his military duty, the young ensign who marched with no colleague on either flank threw glances left and right at the pale faces of the smelly populace. Men clasped their hats to their breasts, women blubbered unashamedly, as if they had known and cared about the deceased. The seventeen-year-old sniffed disdainfully at this preposterous display of grief for a man none of these people had known and thought again of the riddle tormenting him: when did a man first sense his own destiny? The seriousness of the conundrum acted like a reproof: he faced front, irritated by his lapse in propriety, suddenly punctilious under the eyes of this emotional multitude whose power he sensed as in abrupt realisation. It was such an immense novelty, reversing his previous mild contempt, so that he entirely forgot – at least for some moments – the pinching of his borrowed shoes.

  Up ahead of him, beyond the dancing pike-heads that gleamed in the sunshine, beyond the ported muskets of the battalion’s van-guard, the regimental colours were furled; they too bore long trailing ribbons of black silk, topped by a wreath of laurel. At the very head of the regimental column, leading the slowly trudging companies of musketeers and pikemen as they crunched the specially laid gravel under their feet, marched the battalion’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Grey. Slightly to his right rear came Captain John Downing; both officers bore drawn swords, but reversed, made impotent, tucked under their sword-arms as symbols of deep mourning. The soldier they honoured with such studied magnificence had certainly himself been a man of destiny, of that the young ensign had no doubt.

  The young man’s eyes flickered again to Razeby’s risible legs until the spur’s prick of duty made him face front again, mindful of his conspicuous position and that he must not appear as ridiculous as Edmund Razeby, borrowed shoes notwithstanding. He diverted his mind, thinking again upon the tormenting question: when did a man sense his own destiny?

  Was Razeby asking himself this same question? Had such a thought ever occurred to Razeby or any of the other ensigns marching ahead of him? The young man did not know; he did not think the question would arise in the minds of the crowd lining their route of march, for these were shop-keepers, journeymen, tailors, cobblers and men of little account, men encumbered by wives, progeny, the quotidian distractions of making-ends-meet – ordinary people. Setting aside the bothersome consideration that he too found it difficult to balance income against expenditure, was it at all possible that such a question occurred only to him?

  To himself alone? The conviction that this was indeed so stiffened him: but if so then why? Why did he, Ensign John Churchill feel … well, something so powerful yet so inchoate?

  Because, something whispered in his head, you are set apart. The evidence for this elevated point-of-view, his conceit told him, is that you have been chosen to form a rank of your own in the rear of the First Regiment of Foot Guards – all alone under the very eyes of Major William Rolleston, the ten regimental Captains (five of them knights), and its commander, Colonel John Russel, who marched immediately behind him, in the position of regimental honour.

  It occurred to the young Ensign Churchill, whose shoes were by now pinching him abominably and the pain of which had now again intruded upon his sensibilities, that perhaps Rolleston or one of the captains, such as Robert Arthur or Sir Thomas Daniel, might be viewing his own calves with the same disdain as he regarded Razeby’s. Perhaps he was not so special, after all. Certainly his borrowed footwear confirmed his poverty. (By God, Corbet had such damnably narrow feet!)

  Despite the physical discomfort, or perhaps because of it, the question persisted: when did a man sense his own destiny? Was this perhaps such a moment? An instant when he was vouchsafed a sudden revelation of the future – his future?

  Churchill knew that behind Colonel Russel a groom led one of the chargers lately belonging to the dead man to whose good name these excessively expensive and overblown exequies were dedicated. Since they had marched off from Somerset House, wherein the deceased had lain in state, he had heard it whinny intermittently; a soft, gentle sound full it seemed – if one were minded to regard such things as having any meaning – of grief. He s
upposed a brute beast that had carried a great man upon its back felt something when the great man died, if only relief that the burden had to be borne no more. And the great man had indeed been great; great in girth as well as character and reputation. Indeed, he had been monstrous at the end, bloated with dropsy, unable to sleep lying down and dying as he had been wont to slumber, upright in a chair, surrounded by his officers as if on campaign and holding a council-of-war.

  Only one among several of the late Duke’s chargers in the lengthy cortege, the softly whinnying stallion was draped in black trappings that brushed the ground, fully caparisoned for war, harnessed and, upon its sable mantle emblazoned the arms of Albemarle – gules a chevron between three lion’s heads erased argent. A pair of huge rowel-spurred black glossed boots was incongruously reversed in the silver stirrups. Behind this magnificent steed, whose occasional snicker accompanied a brave toss of its noble head, marched the Lord General’s Regiment of Foot Guards. While the young ensign’s battalion was commanded by men of impeccable Royalist lineage, having been newly raised nine years earlier at the Restoration of His Blessed Majesty King Charles II, the Lord General’s had been a unit of the New Model Army and had served the Commonwealth and Protectorate during the Interregnum. It was, therefore, a Roundhead regiment, but more specifically it had formed the key battalion of the English Army in Scotland, for its colonel and commander had been the great man himself.

  Though relegated to the junior position in respect of John Churchill’s own regiment, marching behind it, the Lord General’s men had been nick-named ‘Coldstreamers’ and knew themselves to be the older foundation. Symbolically disbanded at the Restoration, laying down their arms in ritual submission upon the order so to do, they had immediately been ordered to pick them up again, resurrected en masse into the Lord General’s Regiment. No wonder they had taken ‘Nihil secundus’ as their motto: second to none. Wondering upon the workings of destiny, Ensign John Churchill could sense them stiff with pride as they too slow-marched, their drums muffled, their officers in black scarves, their colours furled and beribboned in sable. They were commanded by their new Colonel-in-Chief, the Right Honourable William, Earl of Craven, the man appointed by the King to fill the dead Duke’s shoes. Craven, it was rumoured, had already received the Royal Assent to rename them the Coldstream Guards later that day.

  The sense of the Coldstreamers’ pride and pain, their genuine grief and remorse at the death of their Captain-General who they had followed south from the Scottish town on the River Tweed from which they had taken their soubriquet, seemed almost palpable to young Churchill marching ahead of them. He felt somewhat callow, if only for belonging to the parvenu, if senior, regiment. Almost in spite of himself he felt the Coldstreamers’ sense of self-importance, generated by the part they had played in the monumental events of the Restoration. He, himself, had been but ten summers old at the time but, unbidden, his back stiffened, he held his head higher and his eyes no longer glanced at Razeby’s spindle shanks or wandered towards the staring crowds, or thought of the fluid draining out of his burst blisters to stain and ruin his yet-to-be-paid-for silk stockings. Even Razeby seemed more erect and steadier on his thin legs as the long column with its black mantling, wreaths of laurel, furled colours and muffled drums swung to the left, battalion by battalion, out of the Strand, leaving on their right the reeking stews, tenements, ale-houses and gin-shops of ‘Porridge Island’ and heading now towards Whitehall Palace and the Abbey church of King Edward the Confessor beyond.

  On either side, drawn up at intervals of a fathom, commanded by their gentlemen officers, the Trained Bands stretched left and right. Churchill again allowed his young professional and entirely inexperienced eye, to scan them: citizen soldiers, good for little except keeping their fellows in order, an unblooded and utterly ignorant part, he concluded superciliously, unlike the soldiery of which he was, marching with slow, measured tread to the insistent, rhythmic thud-thud of the melancholy drums. The noise, beaten out nearly simultaneously by the drummers placed every few yards in the long column, thundered back from the house-fronts on either side of the street as they approached the northern entrance to Whitehall Palace.

  Here, at the Holbein Gate, the ranks closed inwards for the passage of the portal, slightly slowing the pace of their advance. On his left Churchill had now drawn level with the white splendour of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. This too seemed joined in their mourning, for it was from the black-draped window at the higher end of the building that the King’s father had stepped to his execution. King Charles the Martyr many called him, whose death, it was said, had been marked by Almighty God with a new star in the heavens that the astrologers called Cor Caroli – the heart of Charles.

  The recollection, as they passed the place of horrible execution, almost stopped Churchill in his tracks as his heart skipped a beat: when had the ill-fated King Charles first sensed his destiny? Churchill knew that the late King’s insistence on his divine right to rule had precipitated his fatal collision with the English Parliament, so where did that leave the question that troubled the young man? They said that even as they tried him for High Treason, Charles Stuart had studiously refused to recognise the court before which he was arraigned. Had he never sensed his moment of destiny, or did he deliberately wish to become the martyr of popular belief? The thought was chilling and the young man felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle with apprehension. Charles, born to be a king, could surely never have sensed he would end his life upon the scaffold like a criminal. And yet he had been condemned and executed, all according to a form of law judged just and satisfactory by those exercising it – all of whom at some time or another had broken their vows of loyalty, just as the great man had done.

  Did one sense one’s destiny in the making of such difficult decisions, Churchill wondered? Did King Charles not confront his terrible moment of realisation until faced by the full and sombre panoply of a court that, for all his refusal to recognise it, successfully condemned him to die? But that was too late, for all that his stubborn nature lent his hauteur the touch of courage, or was that very lateness, that culmination, the moment in Charles Stuart’s life towards which all other moments had been leading?

  A man born a prince did not have to consider the quotidian questions of mere survival; perhaps fate made him pay for this privilege by concealing or delaying any moment of revelation. In which case fate ought to be kinder to those with fewer advantages. Surely the hero they were honouring, the Lord-General of all land forces in the Kingdom, a man who had twice governed Scotland, had served Cromwell as a General-at-Sea, who had hoisted his flag as an Admiral under the commission of King Charles II, and stood alongside the King’s cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine; a man created Duke of Albemarle, Earl of Torrington, Baron Monck of Potheridge, Beauchamp and Teyes, Gentleman of His Majesty’s Bed-Chamber, One of the Lords of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council and Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and sometime Member of the Convention Parliament for the County of Devon, a man granted the unique privilege of immediate right of entry to the Royal Presence at any time, a man whom, it was said, the King regarded as a step-father; surely he must have sensed a moment of destiny? How else could he possibly have precipitated so momentous and consequential an action as the Restoration of the Monarchy after years of Puritan misrule?

  Yet Monck, Albemarle, call him what you will, had changed sides twice! Churchill considered this, concluding, with the naivety of youth, that this had been necessary and – in view of the great man’s success – perfectly honourable. His own loyalty was not something Churchill had yet had tested. He was the Duke of York’s man, an élève, hoisted into his position thanks to the fleshy temptation of his sister Arabella Churchill, the Duke of York’s mistress. It was something Churchill preferred not to dwell upon, nurturing his own ambitions and burning to justify his good opinion of himself in the eyes of others. Arabella was but a stepping-stone to him, a mea
ns by which he might distinguish himself by his own meritorious conduct. That was why he so ardently sought a sign for himself, searching in the life of George Monck, the first Duke of Albemarle, some evidence that fate showed her favour to those she chose to spring the hinges of history.

  It never occurred to him then – such was the callow nature of his young mind which was simultaneously attempting to forget the pain of his pinched feet – that it is not fate that decides a moment of destiny, but the insight, conviction and courage of he who seizes it.

  Not knowing that there was no answer to his question, the young officer of the King’s Guards gritted his teeth against his discomfort as the procession entered the precincts of Whitehall Palace. The constriction of the thoroughfare increased the thunderous reverberations of the drummers so that the complex of buildings and the long wall to the left behind which lay the Palace gardens, threw back a concatenation of echoes, echo-upon-echo in long and mournful diminuendo.

  Here it was, Churchill knew, in his official London residence among the Royal Apartments that were commonly called The Cockpit (and which they were just then passing upon their right-hand) that Monck had died upright in his chair. The thought of death, chiming with the exquisite pain in his feet, chilled the young man. A moment or two later they passed the southern King Street gate-way, then inclined to the right and approached the little parish church of St Margaret’s nestling in the shadow of the Confessor’s great Abbey.

  Still the question vexed him.

  THE TOWER

  Winter 1644

  ‘Sir?’ A pause, then again, more sharply: ‘Sir?’ And again: ‘Sir?’

  The young woman stared angrily at the sturdy back of the man in the window. The small stone chamber was ill-lit and his powerfully built body with its broad shoulders shut out what light the gloom of the late November day afforded the sparsely furnished room. He stood stock-still, apparently oblivious to her presence. Aware of his sheer, intimidating bulk, she rounded on the turnkey who stood behind her, her expression a mixture of pique and uncertainty. He shrugged, giving his ring of heavy keys a jerk, which made them jingle, but to no avail; the man at the window seemed detached, insolently oblivious to them both.