The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [349]
For everyone else, however, the most notable event of the day came when Mr Martell made his speech.
‘I know that many of you may be wondering,’ he declared, ‘if it is my intention to take the last Albion out of the Forest. I can assure you it is not. For while our interests must, of course, take us to Dorset and Kent, and London too, it is our intention to build a new house here, to replace Albion House.’ It was not to be on the old house’s wooded site, however, but upon a large open area just south of Oakley where he intended to lay out a park with views towards the sea. Plans for a fine classical mansion were already being drawn up. ‘And to make it clear that in our new order we have not forgotten the old,’ he cheerfully declared, ‘we have decided to call it Albion Park.’
1804
Everything was ready at Buckler’s Hard, that warm evening in July.
The last three days had been especially exciting. Over two hundred extra men had arrived from the naval dockyards at Portsmouth to help with the launching. Riggers, they were called. They were camped all around the shipyard.
The launching tomorrow would be one of the most impressive that the shipyard had ever undertaken. Two or three thousand people were coming to watch. The gentry would be there, and all sorts of great folk from London. For tomorrow they were going to launch Swiftsure.
It was only the third time in the yard’s history that they had built a great seventy-four-gun ship. Even Agamemnon had been only a sixty-four. At seventeen hundred and twenty-four tons, the ship towered over the dock. The Adamses were to be paid over thirty-five thousand pounds for building her.
Business had been brisk at Buckler’s Hard. At the age of ninety-one, old Henry Adams was still seen about the yard, but his two sons ran everything nowadays. In the last three years they had built three merchant coasters and a ketch; three sixteen-gun brigs, two thirty-six-gun frigates of which the second, Euryalus, had been built alongside Swiftsure, and the mighty seventy-four-gun herself. Another three brigs, twelve guns each, were already in production. Indeed, the yard was so loaded with work that the Adamses were often behind schedule and their profits were not all they should have been. But the completion of mighty Swiftsure was still a cause for celebration.
Puckle certainly meant to celebrate. He had been working on Swiftsure ever since the keel was laid.
They had been long years, the years of exile before that. He’d been busy enough. Isaac Seagull had dropped a discreet hint to old Mr Adams; Mr Adams had spoken to a friend at the shipbuilding yards at Deptford, on the Thames outside London. And a month or so after he had slipped away out to sea, Puckle the smuggler had been patriotically employed building ships for His Majesty’s Navy again.
The Navy had needed ships, as never before. Ever since his arrival in London, England had been at war, or close to it, with France. Out of the Revolution there had now emerged a formidable military man, Napoleon Bonaparte, a second Julius Caesar, who had made himself master of France and who, quite likely, meant to be master of the world as well. His revolutionary armies were sweeping all before them. In England, only the unbending minister, William Pitt, and the great oak ships of the British Navy stood, implacably, in his path.
They had been hard years. The war, bad harvests, French blockades had all hit Britain’s economy. The price of bread had risen sharply. There had been sporadic riots. Puckle, working hard in Deptford, had been well enough provided for; but although he could