The Winter Sea

And then, having noted his presence, I’d simply gone back to my writing, back into the flow of it, lovely, unbroken. I’d never have thought it was possible. But here I was at the end of the scene, and here Graham was, still in the room with me, quietly comfortable, thinking of reasons why young King James hadn’t succeeded in his first rebellion attempt in that spring of ’08.

‘The easy answer,’ he began, ‘is that it failed because the Stewarts never had much luck. I mean, from Mary, Queen of Scots on down, their history’s not a happy one. They didn’t lack for looks, or charm, but somehow they just never had it easy.’

‘Most historians would say they brought that on themselves.’

His sidelong look was inwardly amused. ‘Never trust a historian. Especially Protestant historians writing about Catholic kings. Most of history is only the tale of the winning side, anyway, and they’ve a motive for painting the other side black. No, the Stewarts weren’t that bad. Take James, for example—old James, who was father to your King James. Most of the books that say he was a bad king and cruel and the rest of it, all that came down from one single account that was written by someone just passing on rumors years after the fact. If you read what was actually written by those who were with James, who saw what he did, they have nothing but good things to say of the man. But historians went with the rumors, and once it’s been written in print, well, it’s taken as gospel, and then it’s a source for the research of future historians, so we keep copying lies and mistakes,’ Graham said, with a shrug. ‘That’s why I tell my students to always get back to original documents. Don’t trust the books.’

‘So the Stewarts,’ I steered him back round to the question, ‘just had some bad luck.’

‘That’s one answer. And bloody bad timing.’

I frowned. ‘But their timing was not all that bad in the ’08. I mean, with the English off fighting in Flanders, and the Union making everyone up here feel mad enough to fight, and—’

‘Oh, aye, you’re right in that sense. Aye, of all the Jacobite rebellions, the ’08 was the one that should have worked. They would have had to face the English fleet at any rate—you couldn’t send some twenty-odd ships sailing out of Dunkirk without tipping off the English you were coming—but you’re right, they did manage to get a bit of a jump on them, and on land they’d have met hardly any resistance at all. They nearly broke the Bank of England as it was, there was such panic when the word got out King James was coming. One more day and things would have been such a mess Queen Anne might have been forced to make a peace and name her brother as successor just to save her own position. But I didn’t mean that sort of timing. I meant their specific timing. First,’ he said, ‘the young king catches measles just as they get set to leave Dunkirk. That sets them back a bit. And next they have a storm at sea. And then they miss their mark and end up miles off course, just off the coast up here, so that they have to turn around and lose a day in getting back to where they should be. Then, when they do make it to the Firth, they don’t go in, but drop their anchors, wait the night and let the English catch them. History,’ Graham said, ‘is really just a series of “what if ’s”. What if the French commander hadn’t gone off course? He would have made the Firth a whole day earlier, far ahead of the English ships. What if that first ship that went up the Firth, the…I forget the name…’

‘The Proteus?’

‘Aye, the Proteus. Good memory. What if that ship hadn’t got there first? The Scottish pilots all went out to board her, so there wasn’t anybody left to guide the king’s ship when it turned up later. If the pilots hadn’t been already on the Proteus, the French commander might have tried to make it further up the Firth that first night when the tides were good, and not just dropped his anchor. He could have set the king and all his soldiers down in sight of Edinburgh before the English ships turned up next morning. Mind you,’ Graham said, ‘I’m not so sure the pilots would have made a difference.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because I’m not so sure the French commander wasn’t doing just what he’d been told to do.’

I caught his drift. ‘You mean that it was meant to fail?’

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. The Jacobites had all along been asking for the Duke of Berwick to be in command of the invasion, but the French king gave them someone else. Berwick himself was furious, afterwards. Wrote nasty things in his memoirs about it, and said he’d have landed James safely on shore, and I don’t doubt he would have. And not everybody thought the French ships went off course by accident. Your Colonel Hooke once told the story that he couldn’t sleep that night, and went on deck, and saw that they were sailing just off Cruden Bay, far north of where they should have been. So he ran to tell the commander, who made a big show of being surprised, and said he’d correct the course at once, but later on Hooke saw that they were headed north again, and when he asked the helmsman he was told that was the order, so Hooke went to tell the king they’d been betrayed.’

‘I don’t remember reading that.’

‘It’s in Oliphant, I think. Oliphant’s Jacobite Lairds of Gask. I’ll look it up for you.’

There wasn’t much to do with Hooke I hadn’t read, but then there wasn’t much of Hooke that had survived. Most of his writings were gone. After the rebellion failed, all sides had done a massive cover-up that would have put Watergate to shame, and most of Hooke’s writings and notes were impounded. Only two small volumes had escaped the purge. What else he might have seen and known was lost to history.