The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 1
In the mid-1670s, [Samuel] Pepys and other members of the administration became increasingly alarmed at the navy’s numerical inferiority to the French and Dutch. In 1665, Charles II’s fleet had contained 102 major ships, compared to 81 Dutch and 36 French; ten years later, the picture had changed alarmingly…[Figures that Pepys presented to Parliament in […]
Keeping the Past Alive
As followers of my Twitter feed will know, I spent much of last week at the first Defence Heritage Conference, splendidly organised by Wessex Institute of Technology and held at the Royal Beach Hotel in Portsmouth. This proved to be an excellent event with some great networking and interesting papers, ranging geographically from Taiwan to […]
