This castle, seated, as its name bespeaks, in a meadow, had appeared too paltry a conquest to the sanguine and impetuous Buckingham, when he had first landed at Rhé. He had passed it untouched, but it was now well garrisoned with French troops from the mainland; still its importance was not fully comprehended until the fatal moment came for a retreat from before Fort St. Martin. It is evident that the Duke had overlooked that which should have been a preliminary step in his march; and that his attention had been distracted by an undertaking too arduous for a man whose life had been passed in a very different battle-field from that on which he now ventured his fortunes. Hitherto, he had been a mere civilian, knowing nothing of war, but in the Tourney--nothing of nautical matters, but in gala-vessels, or some favourite ship; and little of the sea, but on maps. Well might his mother caution him not to engage in too “great business;” it was not, in his case, an idle warning, but desperation had impelled him to make the fatal experiment of being at once General and Admiral in a contest with warriors so perfect as the French. Had he been reinforced in good time,--had the measures at home been directed by energy, or even by good faith merely---the events which so overclouded his later actions with a shade of shame might not have happened. From the moment when the French occupied the Fort St. Pré, the game was, however, virtually lost.
Meantime, Charles I., it is manifest from his letters to Lord Holland, was beginning to be seriously displeased with the negligence of the Commissariat Department. He was also desirous of impressing Lord Holland, not only with the great importance of the result of the expedition, but likewise of his anxiety for the safety of the Duke, “to whom,” the King writes, “whosoever does the best service is the most happy, be it for life or death.”[[77]]
So late as the latter end of October, Buckingham was resolved either to stay in the island if supplies came,--or, if they did not arrive, to put himself and the army into La Rochelle, and “run their fortune.”[[78]] This was his last resolution. At one time he had fully determined on leaving, for some of his soldiers were barefooted: others were sick of the siege, and had neither bread, meat, nor beer; but the Duc de Soubise had re-assured him, and, promising eight hundred men from La Rochelle, had encouraged Buckingham to decide on scaling the Fort St. Martin.[[79]] Meantime, Lord Holland did not appear: he was still at Plymouth. Contrary to the advice of the mariners, he had forced the whole fleet out of the Catwaters into Plymouth Sound; but it was driven back by the “cruellest storms” of twenty hours’ duration that had ever been known. Great damage was done: it was now necessary to stay to repair the crazy ships--the wind, as Lord Wilmot expressed it, “did so overblow.” The violence of the elements, and the knavery or indifference of man, seemed combined to keep back aid from the hungry soldiers in the Island of Rhé, and to ruin their general.
Perhaps the best, or, as many persons think, the only excuse for Buckingham in the step he eventually took, is contained in a touching letter from Sir Allen Apsley to “Honest Nicholas.” Apsley, described in one of the letters from the camp as “very sick and melancholy,” dates his letter “from his sick and lately senseless bed on board the Nonsuch.”[[80]] “No man,” he begins by saying, “has he more cause more faithfully and more affectionately to love than Nicholas.” “His soul melts with tears to think that a State should send so many men, and no provision at all for them. But for Nicholas’s provision, through merchants, they had been miserably starved long since.” He then goes on to relate that “there were about five thousand seamen and four thousand landsmen in great distress for meat and drink. The army had already lost four thousand men, and all their commanders.”
A sort of responsive testimony to the Duke’s sufferings, and to the cruel neglect of the authorities at home, is conveyed in a letter from William, Earl of Exeter, to Buckingham. “What cannot be obtained by your courage,” writes the descendant of the great Burleigh, “must in the end be submitted to your patience.” If the Duke “sowed onions, he would be sure of onions; if he sowed men, they are in danger, for the most part, to come up ingrates.” “The indolence,” he adds, “which his highness has cause to resent, is as great infidelity as is that of commission.” Then he cites examples of great generals, who, without loss of honour, abandoned enterprizes which could not be accomplished; what the Duke had already done was, he said, “miraculous.”[[81]]
Neither did the Duke receive any encouragement to remain, even from one of his best friends, Sir George Goring, the faithful adherent in the great rebellion of Charles I.[[82]] Goring had, in a former letter, represented to the Duke how futile would be any dependence on supplies; for the “City,” he wrote, “whence all present money must now be raised, is so infected by the malignant part of this kingdom, that no man will lend any money upon any security, if they think it will go the way of the Court, which is now made diverse from the State--such is the present distemper.” The King, it was said, might choose to break all his bonds, “and[“and] then, when should they be paid?” Under these circumstances, Goring strongly advised the Duke to return home, and “to curb the insolence of the French some other way.”[[83]]
On the very day on which this letter was written, a newsletter, dated on board the Triumph, in the Road of Rhé, announced that the embarkation of the troops had already taken place. La Rochelle had by that time been completely blockaded by the French--too late it had declared for the English. For the safety of that city it was essential that Buckingham should remain; but, although he has been almost universally condemned for retiring, it is evident that the want of provisions, and the delay of reinforcements from England, extenuate, if they do not wholly justify, that step. He had now been expecting Lord Holland’s arrival for nearly a fortnight, and Lord Holland was still at Teignmouth--having been again driven back by contrary winds.[[84]]
During all this time, no words could describe all the distress of mind suffered by Buckingham better than those of his biographer and attached adherent, Sir Henry Wotton. “In his countenance, which is the part that all eyes interpret, no open alteration,” even after his reverses, could be detected, but the suppressed feelings were the more poignant for that disguise.
“For certain it is,” adds Sir Henry, “that to his often-mentioned secretary, Dr. Mason, whom he had in pallet near him, for natural ventilation of all his thoughts, he broke out into passionate expressions of anguish, declaring, in the absence of all other ears and eyes, ‘that never his dispatches to divers princes, nor the great business of a fleet, of an army, of a siege, of a treaty, of war, of peace, both on foot together, and all of them in his head at a time, did not so much trouble his repose as a conceit that some at home, under His Majesty, of whom he had well deserved, were now content to forget him.’”[him.’”][[85]]
Wotton partly ascribes the Duke’s failure to one cause--an improvident confidence, brought with him from a Court where fortune had never deceived him. Besides, he adds, “We must consider him yet but rude in the profession of arms, though greatly of honour, and zealous in the cause.”