The Devil Upon the Wave by J. D. Davies

Author:J. D. Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

All in the moment through the gloom were seen

Ten thousand banners rise into the air

With orient colours waving: with them rose

A forest huge of spears: and thronging helms

Appear’d, and serried shields in thick array

Of depth immeasurable…

John Milton , Paradise Lost

Even with the authority of Lord Percival at my disposal, it took an inordinate time to put in place the essentials for my mission. Matters of military protocol had to be resolved between the Duke of York, as colonel of the Lord Admiral’s Marine Regiment, and the Duke of Albemarle, as captain-general of the army, who saw no urgency in my business – but then, my brother did not think it appropriate to share the true purpose of that business with the corpulent old duke. For my part, it meant days of walking between Saint James’s and Whitehall, sitting in anterooms for hours, and then walking back again, empty handed. As far as my brother and I knew, the Dutch were still off our coast, making no move; but all that, of course, could already have changed, and the news might not yet have reached London that Landguard had already fallen, Harwich dockyard already been burned. Finally, though, the machine of England’s government completed every revolution of its countless cogs, and I was ready.

I set off before dawn for Harwich, by way of Romford, Chelmsford, and Colchester. The roads were busy with companies of regular or militia troops, marching either south toward Tilbury or in the same direction as me. All of them saluted me, for I must have been an impressive sight. Mounted upon a shining black stallion from my brother’s stable, I was attired in a yellow tunic coat, long riding boots and a lobster-pot helmet. A baldric ran across my chest, securing my grandfather’s sword in its scabbard. At my back marched sixty men, half with muskets, half with pikes, all clad, like me, in yellow uniform coats. I was no longer Sir Matthew Quinton, sometime captain of His Majesty’s ships Happy Restoration, Jupiter, Wessex, Seraph, House of Nassau, Merhonour, Cressy, and Royal Sceptre. None of that mattered on the road to Harwich. But Sir Matthew Quinton, major of the Duke of York and Albany’s Marine Regiment, mattered a great deal. With the troops at my back, all veterans to a man, I could have suppressed a small rebellion.

In truth, though, I felt an utter fraud. My commission was originally a device adopted in the summer of the previous year, 1666, to provide me with the authority to deal with a conspiracy of the fractious and disaffected in Plymouth. I drew no pay in the rank, and had no permanent posting. In these present days of King George the Second (who fancies himself quite the soldier, God help us), my few friends among the red-coated crabs, whose acquaintance I maintain out of a kind of charitable pity toward such poor creatures, throw up their hands in horror at such laxity. But then, sixty years ago, the times

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