“To Captain Sir Stephen Blanding, Baronet!” Lt. Gilbraith proposed, now their glasses were full, and they seconded him with, “To Sir Stephen!” gave out loud growls of approval, and knocked their glasses back to drain them.
“Congratulations, sir!” Captain Stroud told him, going to shake hands.
“Hear, hear!” Lewrie added, happy to see the cabin servants go round to refill their glasses for a second toast. “Well earned, hey?”
“Ehm… we’re not quite done, sirs,” Captain Blanding tried to shush them. “There’s something else to celebrate. Stanley?” he prompted Reverend Brundish, with a significant nod and wink.
“Ehm… Captain Lewrie,” Brundish said, fetching forth a very large letter from Reliant’s heap of mail. “This has come for you.” Brundish held it by pressing the tips of his fingers to two of its corners, waving it teasingly, and grinning widely.
It was a heavy creme-coloured bond, the calligraphy for sender and addressee large and “copper-plate” elegant. There was a red wax seal the size of a Spanish “piece of eight” coin to join the corners of the folded-over letter together.
“Uh… for me?” Lewrie gawped.
“No!” Captain Stroud cried. “Really?” Lewrie couldn’t tell if he was astonished at what the letter might hold, or objecting.
“For you, sir,” Brundish assured him, stepping forward to place it in Lewrie’s hands, taking his wine glass to free both. It was from the Crown! Lewrie started to snag a fingernail under the wax seal to rip it free, then looked up, appalled, in need of help.
“Allow me to apply my pen-knife,” Captain Blanding offered with a snort of delight. “A thing like that, you only receive once, and it would be a shame to ruin the seal by tearing it free.”
“Insult to the Crown, what?” Brundish said, snickering.
“It’s really a…?” Lewrie could only gawp, going to the desk in the day-cabin, to watch Captain Blanding carefully lift the seal from three of the four corners. Once folded open, the creme-coloured paper proved to be but a protective sheath for the parchment inside, which Blanding let Lewrie open and read. Once, twice, then an even more dis-believing third time.
“Mine arse on a band-box!” Lewrie exclaimed at last. “They’ve made me a Knight of the Bath?”
“Oh, huzzah, sir! Huzzah!” young Poole cried. “Can’t wait to tell Captain Parham!”
“Congratulations, sir!” Captain Blanding said, taking his hand and giving it a vigourous shake, whilst the rest of them cheered and hooted as if urging their choice of race horse in the last furlong of the Ascot or the Derby.
Why, though? Lewrie asked himself, though shuddering with glee and sheer stupefying surprise.
After a successful victory such as theirs, it was customary for one officer, the senior-most, to be honoured. At Cape St. Vincent it had been Vice-Admiral Sir John Jervis, “Old Jarvy,” rewarded with the title of Earl St. Vincent. After Camperdown, it was only Admiral Duncan who’d been made a peer, and at the Nile, it was Nelson who had been rewarded.
The rewards for captains of the participating warships and the junior officers usually was promotion, or command of one of the prize ships taken. The fellow who’d carried word of the Glorious First of June battle in 1794, the frigate captain who’d carried word of Cape St. Vincent, had been knighted, but… why him, and Blanding, for the same battle?
’Cause I’m “Saint Alan the Liberator,” “Black Alan” Lewrie, he sourly thought; Hero of the Abolitionists like Wilberforce, or… I got knighted ’cause somebody in government’s feelin’ sorry for me for Caroline’s murder by the French!
It was hard not to grimace in anger and pain, and keep a sheepish grin of proper modesty on his face, after that realisation, even as he shook hands with the others and got pounded on the back; while the honour turned to ashes in his mouth!
Was it because he was… “well-known”? For a time, the Abolitionists had showered, papered, London and the nation with praiseful tracts of his theft of a dozen Black slaves from the Beaumans, long before the trial in King’s Bench which had acquitted him. His black-and-white portrait had been on sale, selling almost as briskly as Horatio Nelson’s for a month or two after, and God only knew how many of those, how many of the cartoons, how many illustrated tracts, he’d had to autograph for the adoring and supportive.
He had been turned into a commodity by the Abolitionist Society to further enthusiasm for the end of Negro slavery throughout the Empire, a larger-than-life symbol. And, in the Autumn of 1802, then in the Spring of 1803, in the run-up to the renewal of war with France (though he knew little of it on his tenant farm in Anglesgreen), there had been fresh tracts and portraits, sketches meant to horrify common people that the Corsican Ogre, Napoleon Bonaparte, would order the murder of a British naval hero and his wife over a trivial insult, or mis-understanding taken as an insult by the First Consul for Life of France. Someone in His Majesty’s Government had cynically found him useful… again!
Aye, I’m well-known, Lewrie miserably considered as he took a fresh glass of wine. He was a successful frigate captain. He was a rogue, a rake-hell, too, and known for that to some. The latter repute should have cancelled out any fame from the first, so who had put the idea of knighting him in the Sovereign’s ear?
If he ever had an honest shot at knighthood, it should have come in 1797, when he’d had Proteus, and had fought an equally-matched enemy frigate in the South Atlantic, a two-hour broadside-to-broadside slug-fest in the midst of a howling gale, to save an East India Company trade homebound for England, but… the Earl Spencer had been First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, Sir Evan Nepean his First Secretary, and both of them knew of his peccadilloes with other women, so there had been no hope, then.
Well, I do have allies, Lewrie told himself; sponsors, patrons, and influence. No one could hope to rise in English Society or a military or naval career without “interest,” not politics, or the Church, or trade, or…! There was his old school chum who’d been expelled at the same time as he had, Peter Rushton, now Lord Draywick, in Lords. In the Commons, there was William Wilberforce, Sir Samuel Whitbread, of the beer fortune, and many others of the progressive stripe; there was Sir Malcolm Shockley, married to Lucy Beauman, and in spite of her connexions to his old nemesis, friendly and supportive, too. Admiral the Earl St. Vincent? He was now First Lord of Admiralty, and he had always seemed well-disposed towards him, since the battle that had made him a peer; when Lewrie had been on half-pay, begging for a ship before the expedition sailed for the Baltic to swat the Russians, Swedes, and Danes under Parker and Nelson, it had been “Old Jarvy” who’d allowed him an interview, then surprised him with command of HMS Thermopylae and her solo scouting mission into the Baltic, before the Battle of Copenhagen!
Lewrie suspected a reason even more distastefuclass="underline" that somehow some agate-eyed manipulators in Secret Branch of the Foreign Office, people very much like Zachariah Twigg, found him useful to the Crown and to the Country, once more, and were even now playing up his name, and Caroline’s death, to enthuse the populace!
Wonder if anyone ever refused one? Lewrie thought.
At least his knighthood was for a legitimate reason, he could tell himself, perhaps for cumulative duty? They handed the damned things out to poets, playwrights, painters, town mayors when a new bridge or town hall was opened, for God’s sake! Brewers, iron barons, and wool-spinning tsars!