Red Coats Rising

By Harvey Beach

Opportunities are there for the taking. So thinks Redvers Potter of Stoke Coachworks and Pottery Company, anyway. Travelling to London to invest family money in the new Bank of England, he stumbles across one. A chance meeting with a man on the way leads him to strike out on his own, away from the family company and into the world of navy gunsmithing with a new company.

This is the first step on a considerable journey that is destined to lead him to risk ruin, dishonor, and humiliation and both make and break new friendships and family ties. It also leads to unexpected love, fortune, and marriage. It takes him to exotic India and Europe, specifically Germanic Europe and two hitherto unregarded townsOberglau and Blenheim.

But at least he wasnt alone. He goes with some travelling companionstens of thousands of men in red coats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524662424

Harvey Beach

In a world where everyone has gone to war, not choosing sides is not an option. Lord Simon Montcalm goes to war in 1066 not just because he must be true to his oath to his overlord Duke William of Normandy upon threat of destitution or death for refusal, but because there is great profit to be had. Huge lands and properties in England - the richest kingdom in Christendom. But great profit means great risk in the gaining it and the forces of England are terrible. Being the only male of his noble line, with no male heir himself, Lord Montcalm must win through the politics of his own side and the hazard of bloody battle to earn the promised glory for his name and riches for his family - or die, leaving not just him dead but his whole noble line extinct.

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© 2016 Harvey Beach. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  10/24/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6234-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6235-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-6242-4 (e)

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

Glossary

PROLOGUE

When my friends ask me why I am writing this, I honestly cannot give them a clear answer. My first instinct is to reply it is so when they are older, my grand-children, great-nieces and nephews can understand why great uncle Stumpy has only got a thumb on his left hand. My next instinct is to say it is an exercise in exorcising the demons that still bother me in the quiet hours and, even after all these years, come to harry my dreams, with turbulence and chaos of battlefield memories disinterred from the burial ground they are laid to rest in during my conscious daylight wakefulness. But the truth is, I don’t really know except to say I just instinctively feel that it is a tale I should tell, for it should not be forgotten.

Why shouldn’t it be forgotten? A great deal of history is, either through neglect or because it is too painful for the collective memory to stomach recalling, or people just regretted it was allowed to happen in the first place and want the embarrassment to quietly disappear. But in this instance it should not be allowed to be forgotten for many reasons, but two stand out from among the many surrounding matters of the condition of Europe now prevailing and the personal experiences of all those millions caught up in the events and rip-currents of the period. Firstly, the War saw the demise of the ambitions of the great Sun King, who was the greatest threat (yet – I’m too cynical to believe he will be the greatest ever) to the peace and prosperity of Europe to ever sit upon a throne. Well, with the possible exception of the Habsburgs, seeing as they started the Thirty Years savagery in my grand-father’s time, but that House’s ambition was confined to holding on to a historic power and authority over a Germanic Empire their ancestors had basically founded. They could claim a certain legitimacy to their actions. But the great Sun King, Louis XIV of France, had no such legitimacy for his actions and the butchery and destruction of his wars. What the Sun King did was continental-wide premeditated thuggery and unprovoked banditry – plain and simple.

It also saw the emergence of my country (countries, at the time, for the Great Union with Scotland had not yet come to pass during the times of my life I intend to describe) as the world power it now is. The well established and toughened power of Britain with the commercial families and the great Companies of adventurous people to be found across the whole world now was still young and tender when I was born. As I passed into maturity during the bloody and brutal overthrowing of the Sun King’s primacy, so was born the entity that was to become Great Britain. The great campaign and the climactic battle that started this process (and where I lost my fingers and damned near my head) marked the turning of the tide of French European domination. Although it’s importance may fade with the passage of time, the name will, for a great many generations to come, send a thrill up the spines of all British people (and a shudder down the spine of this one).

Blenheim.

My nephew Caleb once asked me why people who were religious were fighting all the time. Well, he was only nine and he confused hot-humoured rants, drunken wild swings and wrestling in the mud-pit at the Spring Fayre with fighting. I told him they didn’t anymore; that he was too young to remember the real religious fighting, when people thought that religion was really worth fighting over. I was old enough to remember my grandfather’s stories of the Civil Wars and our distaff cousin Hans’s description of the Continental tragedy when he fled to us during the height of the barbarism there. Louts with overly fatted opinions of themselves using religion as an excuse to pick a fight was one thing, but by the time I was born, no reason for entire countries to go to war. Let alone be justification enough to turn a single nation savage upon itself, as happened in the Civil Wars.

Not in Europe, anyway, after the tragedies of the first half of last century. Overthrow a monarch or demand his government be changed was one thing, but start a war….. no.

The evidence of the sea-change in attitudes to religion, now my age and peaceful retirement have allowed me time for philosophy (not a characteristic most would have associated with me in my youth) was obvious. The failures and stagnation of the prosperity and genius of intellect that the mill-stone of the Puritan Commonwealth and theocratic despotism of the Protectorate were undone by the Restoration of the Stuart dynasty to the throne. Charles II’s return showered new nourishing waters of philosophy, industry and husbandry onto a country the voracious weeds, cankers and fungi that had dominated those years had sucked the country dry of. More of that anon, because it affects my story considerably – and intimately. The evidence religion would never be the powder keg it had been, regardless of the strength of flame applied, was apparent to those who, unlike me, had the wit to look.

Charles II had come to the throne with exactly the same problem his father had – reliance upon Parliament for money. He tried trickery, diplomacy and outright brinkmanship to regain control over the country’s purse-strings, but both the Houses were wise to this and blocked or circumvented his efforts. He did, however, have another option. His first cousin King Louis XIV of France.

Now, Charles’s natural antipathy to the Puritan sect that had murdered his father was amply demonstrated, despite promises in exile not to wreak revenge upon his father’s enemies if he was to return. Upon Restoration, the new government had him carried across the sea in one of the old Protectorate’s newly made, best warships called the "Naseby but it had to be hastily renamed the Royal Charles" for the occasion. Almost as soon as his feet hit the sod, he had Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw’s corpses disinterred and ceremonially hanged, along with thirteen surviving signatories of Charles I’s death warrant (the others were in self-imposed Puritan exile, out of reach, already). Then, all those who hadn’t fled into exile were hunted down and savagely punished just as ruthlessly as the Puritans had hunted down and punished Royalists after the Wars.

Parliament had agreed, in return for the King handing over all the revenue of the Royal Estates, to pay him a privy purse of a million, two hundred thousand pounds per year. He then set about trying to negotiate a new ‘settlement’ or agreement of the relationships between the parts that constituted the power base of England. To whit, the Crown, the Houses of Parliament (Lords and Commoners), the Army, the Navy and last and most definitely least, though the great and good that composed it didn’t realise it yet, the Church.

A lot of fatuous squawking had been done on the subject by the intellectual classes and all sorts of useless speculation and idealistic flummery had been vomited out before, and even behind closed doors during, the Puritan drudgery. These are commonly known as the Putney Debates, named after where they were first convened. The best and brightest minds, having stopped rubbing their mitts together in self-satisfaction having topped a despot, finally got around to realising that the country now had a hideous power vacuum and a total lack of any direction, authority, common purpose and mechanism of government and it might be a bloody good idea to find something to replace it with apart from continued anarchy. But Parliament knew exactly that power in the country came with control over the money, as did Charles, and Charles’s every effort to wrest control of the unites (even a wrangle over who was empowered to appoint the Governor of the Tower Mint) fell flat.

So to get fiscal independence from Parliament, apart from his million-and-a-fifth pounds pocket money, he turned his sights over the Channel.

Obviously, his first cousin’s benevolence (and cash) didn’t come without a quid pro quo. Charles had no real religious convictions except his first (and only, according to Grandfather) principle – he believed body and soul, fervently, in anything at all if it was conducive to his personal best interests. For seven years of his reign he launched a faux-Catholicism to persuade his feverishly Divine Right and arch-Catholic patron cousin to stump up the money. But this led to massive stresses with his own anti-Popist people who’d suffered a tenth of the population dead and crippled, a third dispossessed utterly and decapitated his father to overthrow the sort of despotism Louis XIV and Popism represented.

The net result was a reign of constant exercises of brinkmanship between Charles on the one hand, with all his lordly and aristocratic allies, and the other classes using Parliament as their constant wrangling-house. During the early years of the Restoration, all the real

Puritans and those that had far too vociferously nailed their colours to that mast had pooled their funds to leave for the colonies or to found new ones, like Penn. He created, like Robert Rich with his Companies that founded Virginia, the colony of Pennsylvania. Obviously the man was vain as Narcissus to name it like that: Penn – sylvan – ia. The local Chaplin explained. Penn, his name; ‘sylvan’ meaning ‘beautiful land’; ‘ia’ being the suffix denoting ‘land of’. ‘The beautiful land of Penn’. Then again timid and deferential people don’t found colonies cut from unbroken wilderness sod by main force and brute determination either, so after a lifetime’s brutal effort, he’s entitled to a little pride in his work, I suppose.

The rest who had formerly professed Puritanism but opted to stay had abandoned their doctrine of convenience, and it’s name, to hide in a myriad of new sects under new names like Unitarians, Baptists, Quakers and such. Just so they could squirm and plead We weren’t Puritans really, sir! But they were all lumped together by those that knew them for the Puritan hangers-on toadies they were and they just called them ‘Independents’. True, later on a lot of them, those born after the Puritan morass, were both genuine and industrious and did great works of philanthropy and advanced many sciences and philosophies, but through Charles’s reign they served England best by being the immovable object to what Charles falsely believed to be his unstoppable force.

Charles’s pragmatic (or manipulative, depending on your viewpoint) approach to matters of religion were clear in the ordinances he manoeuvred through Parliament. The Corporation Act of sixteen sixty-one, at the beginning of his reign while he was still getting his dancing slippers under the throne, required all of his subjects in Parliament and the Scottish Kirk to renounce the Covenant that had basically precipitated the Civil Wars in the first place and anti-episcopacy. They also had to swear to take Anglican communion. The Sees of the Bishops were restored in both Kingdoms. As a result the House of Lords purged itself of many pro-Puritan Bishops who refused and quit the ranks in a fit of piety, too stupid to realise that was exactly what Charles had wanted in the first place.

The second Act, the sixteen sixty-two Fourth Act Of Uniformity (what in truth meant ‘conformity’, or religious humiliation to those who refused to obey it and got branded ‘Dissenters’) required all clergy of all denominations to use the Book Of Common Prayer, and those that didn’t, or hadn’t been appointed by a Bishop or refused to renounce the Covenant lost their livings and were thrown over for a Bishop’s appointee – and as the Bishops were all the King’s men, therefore his. Two thousand clergy defrocked themselves from the Church Of England after the passing of this Act.

Charles then started to instigate what Archbishop Laud (and his father’s radically High Church wife) had attempted that led to the war that killed his father. Not sensible? Well, I suppose unlike his father he kept his elbow firmly in the waters of popular politics and knew when to pull it out when they got too hot. But enough was done to make both of his Kingdoms, at least upon outward inspection, look like they were heading towards becoming a Catholic country and keep Louis XIV paying his bills.

Charles’s attitude to vigorous adherence to religion was neatly summed up in a courtly quip he let slip in an unguarded moment: Presbyterianism is no religion for a Gentleman. He felt real animosity to any religious zealotry – not only had zealots overthrown and murdered his father, he had enough problems clinging to real power without people looking beyond the mortal sphere for guidance of their actions and to take instructions from. He managed to shrug off the return of the Black Death in ‘sixty-five and the Great Fire of ‘sixty-six as Divine Retribution for his Laudian reforms and Acts, though. In fact, going into the Capital in person to help fight the fire, an act unthinkable for someone as august as the King, endeared him to the masses to an extraordinary degree. It was probably all this combined that turned his head and tempted him into the stupidity of the Treaty Of Dover.

Charles’s rapport with Louis had started to founder in ‘sixty-seven. Charles’s religious brinkmanship was going too far for his subjects but not far enough for Louis, who wanted a full-blown Catholic Absolutism in England like his own in France and he just didn’t understand why Charles couldn’t impose it. England had been waging for some time (much to his Protestant, especially the Independents and Dissenters, disgust) a protracted, scrappy, aimless and non-event of a war with the Protestant Dutch over, as usual, trade. But in ‘sixty-seven the Dutch pulled themselves together and successfully blockaded the still highly distressed London, scratching about trying to get rebuilding going after the catastrophic damage of the Fire. This embargo of trade caused fury among the merchants and financiers of the City as well as enraged public opinion. To add insult to injury, a Dutch flotilla sailed up the Medway and promptly boarded and sailed off with some of the Navy’s first rated ships of the line from Chatham docks.

To Charles’s embarrassment, his first cousin Louis XIV sided with the Dutch. The forced settlement, the Treaty of Breda, was not well received by his people – the British people had been humbled by the Most Popist Despot. However, there was a side-effect to the Treaty Of Breda Louis XIV hadn’t expected. Too late he realised it included a very dangerous clause.

The rise and expansion of the English colonies had been phenomenal, an unforeseen movement in world economics. Louis’s plan had been simple – with Charles’ two kingdoms in vassalage, he’d wipe out Dutch and then Habsburg power, annex the sickly Spanish empire and take over their combined colonies. Thus he would create a French hegemony and supremacy not just in Europe but all the whole occidental world and all their Oriental spheres of influence. But even since before the Civil Wars, Britain had been mercilessly persecuting the Spanish – especially in the Americas – with privateers like Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, leading the charge. Louis was suddenly afraid, in alliance with England, the Franco-English would wipe out Spanish power just for the English (and Scots) to break economically independent of his control upon the tide of wealth from all the Spanish colonies they were ruthlessly accumulating piece by piece.

To compound this, the Treaty of Breda included a clause whereby New Amsterdam was ceded to King Charles. It was promptly renamed New York and the log-jam along the eastern North American seaboard between the northern and southern British colonies removed. The whole mass colonisation of the hinterlands under the new Royal Standard had commenced. New colonies (like Pennsylvania as I’ve described, and a new one around the founding town called Charleston (King Charles’s Town) which is now called Carolina founded in ‘sixty-three) expanded exponentially and the colonial growth was rapid. Especially in the uncolonised territory between Maryland and New England, which had been claimed by (but not developed by) the Dutch. British islanders of all nations flocked in there and quickly the territory became a British colonial fait accompli. Louis was frankly, although you’d never get a hint of it in public, incensed by this adventurous and ambitious economic success so far more pronounced than his own people’s very timid and mediocre colonial achievements.

This potential economic centralised power was a clear and present danger. True, in Louis’ reign the French five or six hundred merchant ships had expanded by sixteen sixty-seven to a fleet fourth fifths the size of England’s four thousand and a seventh the size of the Dutch, freeing the French merchants from paying the extortionate Dutch cargo carriage fees. French trade had increased to the point Louis’s tax yield had expanded from 30 million livres in ‘sixty-one to 65 millions in ‘sixty-seven. Most of this was a result of Louis’s indefatigable polymath of a Chancellor and, in effect, First Minister Colbert. Colbert was also utterly ruthless in reorganising the French public servants. He created efficient, effective and clearly delineated departments with specific territories and responsibilities. Men in office overseen by Colbert’s own hand-picked superintendents to weed out venality, corruption and preference. People stopped buying office with a view to recouping the costs in the long term by systematic graft, fraud, embezzlement and bribery – it just wasn’t worth their while to go to the initial expense because they were almost certain to be caught out so doing. Louis’s punishments for such practices were severe. Being publically flogged with two hundred lashes may at first glance seem draconian, but believe me, in those days, if given the choice you’d have begged for three hundred to avoid the other option of being sent out to one of the French overseas slave hovels they had the nerve to call ‘colonies’ as it’s Governor to die of leprosy, smallpox, typhoid or cholera.

But England’s merchant and mercantile growth made Colbert’s efforts look a paltry achievement. For a start, now initiative, order and stability had been restored, English husbandry and agriculture was now so efficient and virile, for the first time in history, in sixteen seventy, the country actually had so much more wheat than the indigenous labour required (two pounds a labourer a day) it became profitable to export the necessity.

The moment the first British grain ship hit Dunkirk docks (Charles had sold the place back to Louis in ‘sixty-two) Louis knew the prospects of French material dominance of the colonial and economic world hung by a thread. His only hope was to tie Britain, unbreakably, to France. When he suddenly started having his own problems with the Dutch, though, a double opportunity presented itself. To curb, if not emasculate, the Dutch and bind Charles unbreakably to him.

By the Treaty Of Dover, Charles would bring Britain into a war with their common enemy – the Dutch. But there was a secret clause. Louis would also pay an annual subsidy to Charles personally of a hundred and sixty thousand pounds as long as Charles undertook to convert to Catholicism, as it was put in the traitorous document, as soon as the welfare of the Nation would permit. Louis, in this treasonous clause, also undertook to send six thousand troops to his assistance when he did so. They both knew the consequences of this action and basically the Sun King was going to guarantee Charles won the ensuing civil war.

The Sun King was bribing Charles to revisit the hell of the Revolutionary Civil Wars back upon his people so he could make him his puppet. And Charles was going to let him. For a hundred and sixty thousand unites a year, the traitorous bastard.

Well, as you know, the war never happened. This clause became known, all Hell broke loose in Parliament, Charles had to dissolve it for it all to calm down and there was no war with the Dutch. But Charles just about managed to stay upon the throne, but for the first and last time he had to nurse a scorched elbow for letting the water get far too hot. Relations between England and France cooled very significantly for the rest of his reign and England went on to mind her own affairs, generally, without significant Continental entanglements and continued to expand her trade and colonies elsewhere. The Sun King found other things to occupy himself with and eventually Charles’s hyper-active lifestyle (he was using a lot of his million and a fifth to pay for thirty illegitimate children as well as sumptuous accommodations for his actress mistress Nell Gwynne) caught up with him and he died on the sixth of February ‘eight-five of an unexpected palsy. His last words were rather telling. Please don’t let little Nell starve, he pleaded, knowing he’d probably made such a hash of his reign and stored up such ill-will latterly he was desperately hoping his vengeful subjects wouldn’t take out their loathing on probably the only woman he’d ever truly loved in his rampant trollop-galloping life.

But the King had made treasonous pact with a Catholic power to turn Protestant England Popist in return for money by military force – and still he managed to remain enthroned and die in his bed, not on the scaffold like his traitor despot father. When his successor James II of England (James VII of Scotland) came to the throne and outright made a Catholic alliance by marrying an Italian Catholic after converting himself, he was playing with fire. It erupted into conflagration when his wife bore him a son in ‘eighty-nine. The start of a Catholic dynasty was threatened. This was beyond the pale and arrangements were made for a Protestant invasion by the Orange dynasty of our supposed ‘enemies’ the Dutch by leading members of both Houses of Parliament with the implicit support of a heck of a lot of the senior command of the Army and Admiralty. When William Of Orange arrived in the West Country and gathered Lords and powers en route to London, King James found no-one willing to rally to his standard to oppose the ‘invasion’. In fact, four hundred senior Officers and men deserted him during the ‘campaign’, including his former page, friend, adviser, shoulder-to-cry-on and loyal General John Churchill, the Earl of Marlborough, by far his most able military commander. With England having no more stomach for religious war and only apathy for troublesome monarchs, James fled into French exile and William Of The House Of Orange became King William III Of England and King William II Of Scotland in sixteen eighty-nine. Bloodless, it was termed the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

The Sun King, still loathe to accept the Protestant convergence of both Dutch and British political, military and economic powers into King William and his Queen Mary’s hands tried to machinate the downfall of the fledgling dynasty. Ireland, forever the Catholic boil on Britain’s arse, was to be his way in. But his invasion force met with far less local support than his Marshals had planned for and was met by a massive counter-invasion force led by William in person. They were stopped at the River Boyne and William’s army, after crossing that barrier, left the ad hoc Catholic forces broken and dispersed.

No, religion was not to have any influence on the politics and practicalities of power again, although religious persuasion and conscience would still affect the decisions of individual statesmen. At least, the collective decisions made by statesmen have not primarily been motivated by religion up to now in my life and I doubt I’ll see it in the few years remaining me. The hideous bloodshed, calamitous damage and strife of the Revolutionary Civil Wars, the miserable stagnation of the theocratic dictatorships thereafter and the flight of the serious zealots and bigots to the Colonies after the returning to Parliamentary monarchy and prosperity was the triumphal triumvirate that put that bastard notion finally to the sword. All these trials and travails, except to the professionals like the soldiers and sailors caught up in the fighting, had been restricted to the corridors of power – the King’s Council chambers, the Courts, the Chancellery, the Treasury, Privy Councils, the Houses of Parliament. Nothing spilt out to bring misery and havoc, let alone bloodshed, upon the common people still studiously and industriously rebuilding their own, humbler lives from the ashes and ruins of the recent past.

I was too young to remember a lot of this – I was born in May of sixteen sixty-three. And I was too busy to care either, as I and my family were too busy. Taking advantage of the lifting of the dead hand of Puritanism and the explosion in commerce and industry.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

My paternal grandparents were Gloucester folk. Both came from husbandry stock, but grandfather Wilfred was lucky and got an apprenticeship to a Potter in the city. This was as a result of tragedy, because his Master lost both sons to winter sicknesses and diseases when they were eight and eleven respectively and so had no-one to inherit his craft. Grandfather learnt quickly and obviously had both studious eyes and deft hands for the throwing trade. Then fickle Fate cast her malevolent gaze upon his Master’s household again and whilst my father was away carting deliveries of the valuable ceramics, sleeping sickness arrived in Gloucestershire. His Master, wife and their unwed daughter, still only nineteen, were killed in the outbreak and he returned to find cottage and pottery bereft of people and musty with cobwebs that he’d worked studiously in for six years.

Without his journeyman, let alone Artisan, papers he couldn’t re-start the pottery. Eschewing returning to the boredom, poverty and grind, as he saw it, of petty husbandry, he simply gritted his teeth, sifted through the wreckage, gathered a sack of chattels and a leather tool-satchel and went to his modest digs in town. Then he went to the Guild and begged them to issue his journeying documents without his Master’s approval letter. This was not a rare request. Many who had lost their masters during the Wars had done similar and a mechanism had evolved to cope with the problem that had beset the post-Wars Artisan trades but it required him to work for a month under another master to produce his final apprentice’s proving-work. Carpenters, for example, always made their own personal intricate tool-case for the purpose. Not just because the precision drawer and box-work did the trick, but so as to broadcast his skill to potential employers as he later journeyed by the magnificence of it’s workmanship. Grandfather Wilfred, for his defining work, made a coffee service of a dozen sets of cup and plate as well as the carafe, sugar bowl, a dozen lidded spice pots and cream jug. All carefully fired, hand painted and glazed with his own mix.

He was granted the papers immediately, so he then sold the lot on the spot to one of the Guildmaster’s wives for a crown and sixpence and went back to his digs. There he prised up the floor-boards, disinterred his accumulated savings and took ship for the Continent on the next boat out of Bristol.

He journeyed in France, Orange country and Denmark for seven years. When he thought he’d accrued sufficient evidence of successful journey he decided to return. He didn’t return to his home city, though, but instead settled in Fenton. Fenton was one of six towns near the River Trent, the others being Stoke, Tunstall, Hanley, Longton and Burslem, where new communities of Potters had grown up because of access to plentiful coal and clay suitable for earthenware. Between them they produced quality artisan ceramics at an output unrivalled anywhere else in Europe – if not the whole world.

His journeying had been very successful and his new Guild of Potters gave him his Artisan’s papers. A year after setting up in his own right, he met Margaret Garret, a Mason’s daughter. Grandfather worked specifically on the most expensive, commission, personalised pottery. The new ‘bottle’ kiln based pottery Companies could produce in mass firings mundane ceramics with huge economy of scale and a single Potter working upon his own could make no living that way. Because of this, he took a commission from a Mason, who, being stinking rich, commissioned him to provide a whole domestic range of monogrammed plate for his second son’s wedding present. He thus met Margaret Garret and a somewhat socially unusual but not unheard of courtship between a Potter and a Mason resulted.

They married in ‘thirty-nine and had four children. My father, Jacob Potter, was the second son and he followed in his father’s footsteps, taking over the pottery.

On my maternal side, my grandfather was Derek, a Carpenter, and his career was even more adventurous than that of grandfather Wilfred. He was already a journeyman of four years’ standing when his adventurous nature beckoned. He also eschewed staying in the country. This was not out of tragedy, however. He’d always had itchy feet. Bored with the drudgery of the orthodox path in the Carpentry trade, he packed his tools and baggage and took commission as Ship’s Carpenter upon a ship headed for an American colony owned by one of the new Company shipping lines formed by an association of Captains. He served for three years at sea, including two rather fraught and exhausting (and downright dangerous) stints on one of the privateering ships, preying upon Spanish trade goods and bullion. Then fortune really did favour the brave. He took ship on a privateer headed for the Spanish main heavy shipping lanes and they took a Spaniard heavy merchantman after a nasty fight. His portion of the spoils was a huge sum. In their mining colonies the Spaniards took the ore of all grades and smelted it into unweighed ingots of the gross, pure metal for transport to Spanish Mints. It was a smelted silver raw bullion ship they took – tonnes of reckoned pure metal.

Having decided, with his silver windfall, to avoid the hazards of seafaring for more sedate, though less potentially remunerative, land journeying, Grandfather Derek toured the colonies (Dutch as well as English, where he picked up the language) and returned in the spring of sixteen thirty-eight to Bristol. There he met, virtually on the quayside, a young Irish woman called Kerry O’Sheen.

Grandmother Kerry had also endured an adventurous life. She had been married to one of the sons of a Scot who had settled in one of the Irish colonies. He had turned his back on his Presbyterian upbringing and adopted Catholicism and for an easier life left Scotland for Ireland where he’s prospered in husbandry and raised a large family. But her husband, who inherited much of his father’s land before Kerry met him and had continued the success thereon, suffered a series of bad harvests shortly after the marriage. When Grandmother fell in love with a young English rake called Jeremiah Martin she sensed greener grass across the sea. She abandoned her impoverished husband (thus burning her boats with her Catholic family) and went away with him to London.

They set up a household in Hatfield. At first it was satisfactory, although she suspected him of whoring after (and during) ‘business’ in the City. However, that was standard practice for rakes who set up drunken debauches for young men with riches but little brains to fleece them of their money. But inevitably, he eventually came across and practised sharply with a man who wasn’t a fool and had a very energetic, nasty nature to boot.

Jeremiah Martin’s body was dragged out of the Thames and she had to run in January ‘thirty-six. Her husband’s unpaid creditors (whose existence she was unaware of until they came to slice her face off unless she paid their unites) was the spur to flee with what little she could wear and carry.

Kerry Martin sought anonymity that spring by joining a band of gypsies. She was a brilliant seamstress from her upbringing and could ‘tinker’ her trade better than any village’s local women. It was by these means she earned safe passage to Bristol Docks. There she worked similarly in very austere circumstances to attempt to earn sufficient savings to buy passage back to Ireland. She was in these circumstances when she met my grandfather, who returning home had found his wardrobe in much need of restoration after a trans-ocean voyage.

Legally, Kerry repudiated Catholicism, converted to Protestantism and had her mill-stone marriage divorced. Grandfather gave no heed to the fact the petition was upon the basis of her adultery – he was the sort of man who loved hard and had no truck with constrictive or judgemental social conventions. He wanted Kerry with a fierce passion, ergo he got her.

Kerry Martin became Kerry Carpenter in sixteen thirty-eight and on the first of July sixteen forty my mother Jessica Carpenter was born.

The Carpenters moved to Stoke-Upon-Trent for many practical reasons. Grandfather Derek had revenue to establish himself and knew there was work around the Potteries for an artisan of his skill. Transporting pottery was no easy task and required custom-made carriage. The potteries had masses of ceramic to move and the great road-building that started after the Restoration had yet to commence. Turnpikes with proper smooth paving were few and not generally connected. The rest were just cart-tracks, mostly without even a beaten-down gravel surface, rutted and uneven. Inside large town or city environs the ‘roads’ were even worse. Even the very wealthy, who could afford to travel by sprung coach, found long distance travel an abomination and even in some of the bitterest weather men and even ladies still chose the saddle to the coach-seat for journeys of any distance. The carriage’s rattle, clank, groaning and the interminable lurching and shaking of the transport was utterly exhausting and nauseating. Coach-fitters only lightly tacked the cheapest and thinnest leather possible on coach seats to compact the stuffing. The likelihood of having to re-upholster because the seats had soaked up vomit and other soil for days on end on a long journey was a hundredfold more likely than the leather would actually wear out. You sure as Hellfire wouldn’t find anything but a Duke’s or Royal carriage with anything more valuable than goat or sheep-skin leather on it’s seating. Goatherds also earned good livings, if they could get the trade, providing goat hair to fill the seats – they had to be twice as well stuffed as a lounge fireside chair the amount people’s arses bounced and banged up and down upon the otherwise hard wood boards. Being stuffing, the cheapest, roughest hair of any old scrawny or mangy animal would do for the task and the amount needed was prodigious so only the cheapest was used. If the seats weren’t so stuffed, people would arrive at their destinations in agony and probably with permanent debilitation to their nether regions.

If people found such transport so volatile, imagine what would happen to piles of plates or boxes of cups and jugs. Even packed in sealed crates separated by layers of straw, if after a three day cautiously paced journey over mostly cart tracks, nine plates in ten got through unbroken it was a stroke of benevolent fortune. Every ceramics dealer in every town or city that provided Stoke with outlets for it’s massive production took delivery of so much broken pottery, they literally gave it away in barrels outside their shops. Every cottage or townhouse with flower pots had broken crockery in their pot bottoms when soil drainage had to be assisted. Filling a bag with broken pottery from outside the shop when you went past was easier than having to travel away to the local river to gather pebbles. Using broken pottery to hard core loose foundations or enhance the drainage of the privies and cess pits of dwellings was also commonplace. The Saltpetremen often had scarred hands from emptying the privies by hand and cutting themselves on the shards at the bottom as they grubbed out the last, precious ounces.

After the ’forty-two to forty-six tragedy had played out, Grandfather Carpenter turned his hand to the specialisms of Cartwright and Wagonwright, especially acquiring knowledge as a Springer for the making of sprung carriage for delicate goods. Strong axles and wide wheels to allow easy guiding of the carts around the worst ground. A good Carter, with a best crafted and sprung carriage and diligent, professional handling on carefully selected roads could get your wares to their destination virtually without loss. The life of a good cart was considerable and could make hundreds of journeys, properly maintained and with well greased axles and joints. By definition the traffic had to be slower than average and so there was far lower wear and tear upon the vehicle’s fabric if cared for by a sound Carter. Grandfather charged a premium price for workmanship of his quality, but the additional investment, to a large Company of Potters working year-round to fulfil ongoing contracted works would offset that in reduced breakage very quickly. Then they were in raw profit. The Companies, especially those long-hauling pottery to the far-flung but huge city market stalls and street shops or for shipping for trade overseas or the colonies, lined up to give him orders once, after a couple of years, he’d made his reputation.

He never changed his name to Cartwright, though. He was born a Carpenter and to his dying day stayed one.

Jacob Potter met Jessica Carpenter at a Summer Fayre and market. Jessica’s parents had a large exhibition of examples of his craftsmanship and Jacob’s parents had a huge stall of various domestic plate. It was a fairly dull summer and they both huddled in the coffee and chocolat marquee. Cocoa from the south of the American continent and sugar had become a very fashionable drink for the young, wealthy and fashionable. Although far from poor, it was still a luxurious item for Jacob and Jessica, but they both had decided as the Fayre was only once a year and a special occasion, indulging themselves in the luxury was justifiable. It was over this rich beverage they made acquaintance and the two families as a result came to know to each other.

This meeting of Potter and Carpenter proved serendipitous. Wilfred Potter and Derek Carpenter quickly saw the advantage of alliance. Diversity of business could provide a stabilising influence from the hazards and rigours of fluctuation of demand in their individual trades. Wilfred already had three journeymen working for him and his own apprentice. Derek had twelve men labouring for him too. They went to see Cornelius Bramble, a local Banker, who agreed to assist them in establishing a Jointly Stocked Company for profit division and cost sharing. The Stoke Joint Ceramics And Coachworks Company was born when they signed the Articles Of Association in sixteen sixty – the year of the Restoration and the year before my parents married.

The timing of the foundation of Stoke Ceramics And Coachworks was perfect, although at the time my grandparents and parents didn’t realise the fluke at the time. Charles II came to the throne and soon recovery was well in hand. For ten years England redeveloped and bloomed. After his father had been beheaded in ‘forty-nine, the stagnancy of the Commonwealth (was there ever a worse misnomer?) and Protectorate had placed a dead hand on the country already crippled and withering, as I’ve previously described. A populace of destitute and homeless refugees. Swathes of areas depopulated and abandoned. Uncountable hundreds of hamlets and villages, let alone the major towns and cities, burnt out of existence or left deserted, shattered ruins. Hundreds of thousands of acres of formerly husbanded land gone wild, millions of animals in herds and flocks slaughtered or dead from sickness or starvation as they went untended or just scattered and wandered wild. The Restoration saw an end to that and England began to prosper again.

With the mutual distrust and lingering enmity from the War cloaking people with it’s cold, dead weight, the survivors and refugees after War’s end had crept back to find nothing or settled elsewhere knowing there was nothing to return to. However, in a land where nine tenths of the people worked the land and with a tenth now dead, there was a heck of a lot more land to go around and no-one (except a rival claimant) to naysay it wasn’t yours. After some initial nastiness, the savaged settlements became repopulated and the land put back under the plough.

You can’t fight and work at the same time and husbandry, especially the bone-breaking and muscle-crippling early effort of restoring feral land back to ordered productivity is the prime example of this principle. Husbandry is the ultimate communal activity. No man can be ‘Jack-of-all-trades’, and there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to do so even if he were. Strangers forged new alliances out of necessity as the hamlets and villages became resettled, especially in the areas that had faced the worst of the excesses, civil and military, of the Wars. Areas like the Midlands and West Country and the North-East. Refugees found havens and deserted land and settled there as no-one objected – there usually was no-one left to object. Settlements that had numbers of people forced to flee, leaving gaping holes in their social provision (no Thatcher, or Smith, or Farrier, or Hedger in the Parish, for example) found itinerants with skills coming in and they filled the void. Yes, itinerants, because they could vanish without a trace, still held that lingering suspicion of being far less trustworthy than a man from a family yours had known going back four generations without a stain upon their characters. But needs must. When a generation or two of unblemished conduct had gone by and the local Church’s Register showed successful local marriages and births and the yard had a couple of upstanding swinkers of the newcomer’s lineage proudly holding up gravestones from a fathom below the sod, such anxieties dissipated.

When the dead hand was lifted with the Restoration, therefore, the country was well upon the road to healing itself of the hideous wounds of the Wars. More land per head and fewer people meant better ways of husbandry had to be found to maximise the use of the land. The hideous losses of all types of working animals during the Wars – donkeys, mules, asses, oxen, ponies and especially horses – was also a problem. Mechanical means to better multiply the use of the remaining animal labour were devised. New devices, better preparation of the ground, better quality equipment and more rational layouts of the fields all emerged as the husbands, landowners and their tenants feverishly pondered and ruminated to devise more and more efficient ways to spread the little labour available, man and beast, across the most land possible.

The holding of land in perhaps a third of the country had changed as well. Before the anarchy and destruction of the War, large areas had been hodgepodges of ridiculously irrational holdings as a result of many generations of inheritances and alliances of marriages. Fathers splitting large fields into packets among several sons, then sons marrying to daughters with far-flung packets generation after generation had it’s inevitable result. A man might find himself heir to five acres and marry a woman with four, only to find the nine was spread over sixteen petty patches in three different counties! But in the War, huge numbers of families were massacred, or burnt out and left destitute, leaving all their property to go feral. When taken over by a new generation starting from an unfettered beginning upon peace returning, rational new ownership of consolidated holdings was the accidental but benevolent, and more efficient, result.

Necessity bred invention. By the time of my birth an economic revolution was slowly and inevitably creeping across the country. Labour, cheap before the War (about two groats a day for a labourer with no particular skills), had become valuable and all those working the land had to become familiar, quickly, with new mechanics, new processes and whole new ordering into far more rational and productive lines. Ad hoc work faded. Workers, often just seasonally whistled up from the hamlets whenever the landlord thought the sun was going to come out, instead found they could say ‘no’. If all they were going to be paid was two groats, then they’d just work for someone else. When two landlords both needed Threshers at the same time, and there was only one Thresher, then one man’s wheat would have to be sent to the Miller husked. As white flour fetched twice the price as brown, that meant the man whose grain went unthreshed lost two shillings in the crown per hundredweight for want of paying the Thresher a realistic wage. Even worse, with a good harvest, if the Miller didn’t have time to take husked wheat at all because there was no time to waste on the lower commission, the crop might even have to be sold whole as animal feed for a pittance. The man that paid less got the profitless crop while the better payer got his wheat threshed, the grain ground and five times the price per sack as the pigswill-fodder. The return of the Black Death in ‘sixty-five (the rats carrying plague fleas jumped the suddenly increased number of trade ships into the hovel slums that had grown exponentially with the trade upsurge of the Port of London) running riot also took it’s toll upon the labour pool.

As a result, far more, in fact the majority, became retained workers and developed a wider range of skills so their stipend paid year-round yielded valuable work year-round. The Reaper, in the winter, did Coppicing or Fencing. Even acted as Ploughman as the autumn came in. The Verderer, whose job in autumn and winter was the cutting down of dead or sick trees and wrenching out dead undergrowth to promote healthy new come next spring would, in summer, go orchard picking and then help Fisher with ripping out the over-hanging bank-growth around the trout and carp ponds. The more skills they had, the more they were worth and the more likely they were to avoid seasonal poverty and famine. The remaining post-War husbandry was well tended and the great Estates that produced the huge output that boomed after the Wars and Resettlement were firmly built upon the foundation of this huge shift in the quality, capability and flexibility of the remaining swinkers that had come about through the combination of both necessity and opportunity.

When my parents wed in ‘sixty-one, England’s revolution in husbandry was only being matched by it’s expansion of trade. The Puritan governments and the restored Monarch both passed various Maritime Acts to try to penalise and damage French and Dutch trade as the Dutch were our obvious rivals and the French, under Louis, was fast emerging as another. ’Fifty-one, ’sixty, ’sixty-one and ‘sixty-three these protective measures were passed. Huge Customary Duty to pay fees for landing goods were enacted too – especially against Irish goods (French imports by the tradesman’s entrance, most of it) and French goods carried upon Dutch ships until Louis had built up his merchant marine. But this authoritarian meddling was not responsible for the upsurge in trade. By no measure. It was the upsurge in practical maritime mechanics and a host of great discoveries by great thinkers that, freed from the religious persecution of speaking thoughts not in line with the established dogma, came about.

Charles II provided a grant for the founding of the Royal Society, an institution for the facilitation of the pooling of thought and exchange of philosophy and ideas. I like to think it came from the money he was getting from the Sun King, for the Society was so instrumental in the advances that eventually led to the trade that paid for the Popist Despot’s defeat. Quickly, when they realised the shackles on thinking novel philosophy that had been imposed by religious dogmatism had been cast off, this new institution absorbed what had been known as the Invisible College. These men, who met clandestine and ad hoc in various places, constantly suspicious of Puritan infiltration and denunciation, could think (and breathe) freely and had a central point where they could all meet to challenge established assumptions and experiment and pool all their wisdom and talent.

This greatly facilitated the huge advances already made by the time I was born. Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler, his younger colleague, had greatly advanced the concepts of mathematics – the building blocks of all scientific discovery. Galileo Galilei, who died in ‘forty-three, had already discredited many preconceptions and created the new science of mechanics and even, with the new concepts of Brahe and Kepler to work with, managed to deduce mechanical laws of the movements of objects to the point of calculating the way an object moves both forwards and downwards when projected – an arc described as a ‘parabola’, and thus the scientific little brother of mechanics, ballistics, was born. Though I doubt the widows and orphans of the thousands of men killed upon the battlefields of Europe during the Wars by the much improved artillery appreciated the advance at the time.

Understanding of magnetism and therefore practical navigation was advanced by Edmund Gunter in ‘twenty-two when he discovered magnetic north and true north were not one and the same. He managed to accurately work out the underlying drift. Writing in sixteen ten, Edward Wright recorded a truthful account of a ship’s captain that, seeking the Azores, failed to find it for weeks. Finally, despairing to the point of suicide, he threw himself overboard in preference to ruin, disgrace and a poverty-stricken death. As late as sixteen sixteen, William Baffin recorded that on an Arctic expedition (the Lord alone knows why he’d go there bar whaling money) he was, by his astral navigation, heading north but his compass was pointing south-west! With better compasses and proper calculation compensating for true north, such never occurred again.

In ‘forty-three, Toricelli invented the mercury barometer and the measuring of air pressure. Blaise Pascal convinced his brother-in-law to take one with him in his ascent of the Puy de Dôme and proved air pressure varied with altitude. The relationships between air pressure and weather were quickly deduced, allowing ship’s captains to make preparations for a lot of condition changes in advance of any potentially tragic occurrence. This revelation in the nature of air pressure was shortly followed by Von Evericke’s amazing invention, the air pump.

Before René Descarte died in ‘fifty, he had made great strides in geometry and Napier’s discovery of logarithms, crucial for astronomical calculations, turned navigation from instinct and guesswork derived from elementary star-gazing and a sextant and compass to a matter of reliable calculation. This was only improved with Isaac Newton and Leibnitz’s refinement and expansion of the field with the discovery of differential and integral calculus. This also greatly aided the science of ballistics, allowing accurate calculation of the variation of tangents from a parabola – another blessing for the war widows and orphans.

The real revolution, though, happened with clocks. Huggan’s new design of pendulum to regulate the mechanism,