Ramage by Dudley Pope Read Free Book Online Page A

read the minutes of the trial of John Uglow Ramage, tenth Earl of Blazey and Admiral of the White many times. It was easy to see how the court had found Father guilty; indeed, since he had refused to be tied down by the Fighting Instructions and had used his own tactics instead, they had no alternative. But the King’s refusal to quash the verdict – which only he had the power to do – was naked politics: Father had an independent mind and had refused to pay court to either Whigs or Tories, so he expected help from no one.
    Ramage realized that since he had only four open boats to carry out orders intended for a frigate his own position was, in a microcosm, similar to the one facing his father fifteen years earlier. Then, the Government, ignoring all warnings about the size of the French forces, sent a small fleet to the West Indies under the Earl of Blazey. And when the Earl arrived to find himself attacked by a French Fleet which was twice as powerful and in circumstances not covered in the Fighting Instructions – which dealt only with a few eventualities – he had used brilliant and original tactics to extricate himself, losing only one line-of-battle ship.
    But, of course, he had lost the battle: against those odds no one could have won it. Any British admiral feeling himself bound by the Fighting Instructions – but unable to get any guidance from them – would have fought an orthodox battle and lost many more ships. In fact, considering he only lost one ship, Father had won a tactical victory. However, there was a fatal combination: first, as usual, the Government had sent too few ships, but when the mobs began to yell in protest over the defeat, it was determined to shift the blame on to someone else’s shoulders; secondly, the Admiral who fought and lost the battle had ignored the Fighting Instructions. That was enough for the politicians: they had a ready-made scapegoat.
    The mobs were never told the Fighting Instructions were not flexible enough to cover that kind of battle; instead a flow of pamphlets and newspaper articles led them to think that had he followed the Instructions he would have won. The fact that his own tactics were brilliant and avoided the heavy losses an attempt to follow the Fighting Instructions would have entailed was never brought out – except when Father made his defence at the trial. Even then the newspapers, which were in the Government’s pay anyway, distorted or omitted what he said.
    The old chap’s speech had been almost too clever; he presented such a well-reasoned argument that the layman’s suspicion of an expert – and the professional’s jealousy – were soon aroused.
    How had Father described the Fighting Instructions? Oh yes, he’d likened them to instructions for a coachman when a highwayman standing in his path orders him to halt. Ramage could almost see the actual print in the leather-bound copy of the minutes of the trial, which was kept in the library at home.
    ‘The Fighting Instructions in effect order the coachman,’ Father had said, ‘to aim his blunderbuss directly over his horses’ heads, and fire at the highwayman. But they do not tell him what to do if there are two or a dozen highwaymen standing to one side of the path or another. They assume it will never happen. But at the same time their orders contain a clause which ensures that, if it happens, whatever the coachman does is wrong: if he fires to the left, to the right, surrenders or runs away.’
    The court could have sentenced him to death; but since the affair of Admiral Byng the Articles of War had been amended to allow a lesser penalty. The court had ordered him to be dismissed from the Service. Ramage had often wondered whether this was, for his father, a lesser penalty than death.
    The man who had emerged from the trial as his father’s enemy had been a member of the Court, a captain low down on the post list but high up in the King’s esteem: Captain Goddard, now a rear-admiral,