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Admiral Movie

The Top Ten

09/10/2017 by J D Davies

I’m not tweeting very much at the moment, as I’m largely keeping my head down and working on my new Tudor project, but the other day, I had a bit of a brainwave, and tweeted a ‘top ten’ of the most popular posts ever (in terms of visitor numbers) on this blog. This seemed to go down very well among the Twitterati, with lots of positive reaction. I realise, though, that a lot of you aren’t on Twitter, and besides, giving the ‘countdown’ here means that I can say a bit more about each of the posts than I could with 140 characters. So, in the spirit of Top of the Pops (unless it was presented by him, obviously, or featured songs by him…), here we go, pop pickers!

I decided to split my top ten into two fives, one for guest bloggers, one for my own posts. So starting with the guest blogger chart –

  • In at number 5, it’s a fascinating post by Victoria Yee of the University of St Andrews on the contribution of the Welsh in the Thirty Years War – an absolute must for those interested in Welsh military and/or seventeenth century history.
  • At number 4…Frank Fox, author of The Four Days Battle and Great Ships, with the most authoritative reconstruction to date of the composition of the French fleet at the Battle of Beachy Head, 1690. (Part 2 of Frank’s study, dealing with the Anglo-Dutch fleet, can be found here.)
  • And at number 3, Professor Adam Nicholls with a synopsis of his superb book about the little known Barbary Corsair raid on Iceland in 1627.
  • Number 2 – Frank Fox again, this time with major contributions from Peter Le Fevre and Richard Endsor, on the likely identity of the ‘Normans Bay wreck’ – a blog post which has had such an impact that elements of it are going to be referenced in the next issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
  • And at number 1 in the guest blogger chart…Dutch naval historian Gijs Rommelse’s terrific, insightful review of the movie Michiel de Ruyter, released in the English-speaking world as Admiral: Command and Conquer. (My own review can be found here.)

So moving on to the chart of my own posts:

  • At number 5, and with a major ‘assist’ from Richard Endsor, it’s a pretty astonishing historical find – quite possibly the fingerprint of Samuel Pepys!
  • In at number 4, a post from back in 2012, looking forward to the temporary return of the Royal Charles sternpiece from the Rijksmuseum for the National Maritime Museum’s Royal River exhibition.
  • Number 3 is probably my personal favourite among all the blog posts I’ve written over the years – my lament for the death of the ‘naval pub‘, broadly defined. Since I originally posted it, another nail’s been hammered into the coffin of the species with the closure of the Lord Nelson at Burnham Thorpe. Hopefully this will be temporary, but could there be a more potent metaphor for the decline of…well, pretty much everything, really?
  • At number 2, the first post in my long series about the sorry saga of Carmarthenshire Archives – if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, read the three subsequent posts entitled ‘J’Accuse’ too, but for the rather more optimistic current situation, have a look here.
  • And at number 1…cue drumroll…my post from four years ago, ‘A Journalist’s Guide to Writing About the Royal Navy‘, inspired by the consistently dreadful coverage of naval matters in the national media, and which went about as viral as niche naval blogs get. As some of the below-the-line comments proved, though, one should always be careful before sticking one’s head above the parapet in such instances, and I was rightly taken to task for some of my own inexactitudes of terminology!

As I said on Twitter at the weekend, a big thank you to everybody who’s followed this blog since it started back in August 2011. It’s good to know that so many people seem to find things to interest them among my rants and ramblings, so I hope to keep calm and carry on shedding light on some of the more remote corners of naval history and seventeenth century history, and on the process of writing about them, for the foreseeable future!

Filed Under: Maritime history, Naval history, Uncategorized, Welsh history Tagged With: Admiral Movie, Barbary corsairs, Battle of Beachy Head, Carmarthenshire Archives, Iceland, Michiel De Ruyter, Normans Bay wreck, Royal Navy, Samuel Pepys, Thirty Years War

Admiral: Compress and Conflate

05/08/2015 by J D Davies

Long-term readers of this blog will know that I’ve been quite excited about the prospect of a film set against the backdrop of the Anglo-Dutch wars, ever since it first came onto my radar. It premiered in the Netherlands at the beginning of the year as Michiel de Ruyter, and has now been released on DVD in the UK under the title Admiral: Command and Conquer. The eminent Dutch naval historian Gijs Rommelse, who saw it in the cinema in the Netherlands, provided his take on it in a guest post on this site. And now I’ve dutifully watched it too.

I realised as soon as I opened the packet containing it that this is a film I’d watch while wearing several different hats simultaneously, occasionally throwing those hats at each other whenever one sensibility clashed with another. For this review, though, I’ll don each separate hat in turn.

First, the ‘naval historian of this period’ hat (which is a very unfashionable, moth-eaten fedora):

The alarm bells rang at the sight of the DVD case, which claimed that it was about the ‘Greatest Battle Ever’. Now, I’ve been working on the Anglo-Dutch wars for over 30 years. I very nearly wrote a full-length academic book about the Battle of the Texel on 11 August 1673, which forms the climax of the film, and might still return to it one day. But not even in my wildest fantasies, even after consuming (say) a second small glass of shandy at the local, would I ever dream of calling any of the naval battles of that period ‘the greatest battle ever’. And then there was the opening line of the prologue text: ‘The Seventeenth Century: the Netherlands is the only republic in the world’. Luckily, I’d ensured beforehand that all heavy objects that could conceivably be lobbed at the TV screen had been placed well out of reach. Instead, of course, the filmmakers have cued me up perfectly for a variant on one of the oldest and corniest jokes of all:

‘Genoa?’

‘No, I’ve never met her.’

‘What, nor her sister republics Venice and Switzerland?’

It’s the way I tell ’em.

Plaque at Huisduinen church
Plaque at Huisduinen church

Fortunately, things could only get better, to paraphrase the old song, and they duly did. The opening scene, of a church congregation hearing the gunfire from the battle of Scheveningen in 1653, and going up into the dunes to watch the fighting offshore, is not only beautifully done, it also corresponds exactly to a real historical event, albeit one which only residents of, and visitors to, the village of Huisduinen in north Holland will probably know about. The battle scenes are exciting and as authentic as they probably could be – for example, the prevalence of wood splinters as iron balls hit timber hulls, the commands, the atmosphere above and below decks, and so forth, despite the usual constraints imposed by cost (for example, having far too few people per gun, and far too few real ships to play with). Similarly, the scenes at the Dutch Estates General, the scenes of ordinary town life, and De Ruyter’s funeral – a remarkable set-piece, this, and strikingly true to illustrations of the actual event – all give a real sense of what the Netherlands was like in the seventeenth century. But let’s not mention flags and costumes until I put on my next hat…

William of Orange: a tad camp for an Orange parade?
William of Orange: a tad camp for an Orange parade?

As Gijs previously noted, the film actually provides a surprisingly insightful look at the politics of the period, showing De Ruyter’s involvement in the fraught ‘Orangist versus republican’ struggle in a way that even modern biographies of him omit. It also provides a quick but accurate summary of the Dutch ‘naval revolution’ of the 1650s (although you might come away with the impression that this was all sorted out in the space of about three sentences), and of Charles II’s offer of the sovereignty of a diminished rump of the Netherlands to his nephew William of Orange. The latter’s latent (at least) homosexuality is acknowledged head-on, so this film might not be ideal Saturday night post-pub viewing in certain quarters of Belfast, for example.

 

Second, the ‘significant other of person whose son is a film producer’ hat (a really cool baseball cap):

'Sack the casting department!' 'But...he's in Game of Thrones!'
‘Sack the casting department!’
‘But…he’s in Game of Thrones!’

Once again, the alarm bells rang at the sight of the DVD case, which proclaims Charles Dance and Rutger Hauer to be the stars of this film. Indeed, the film’s original Dutch poster has been photoshopped to make Mr Dance bigger and further forward than everybody else, and if that’s not sending out the message ‘he’s the star’, I don’t know what is. Now, I already knew that these two only had cameo roles: indeed, Hauer’s, as Maarten Tromp, is of the ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ variety, dying even before the opening credits. Whereas Dance’s Charles II, hammed up to the nth degree, has only a handful of scenes, playing them as a cloak-swirling, moustache-twirling panto villain (not to mention as a septuagenarian redhead, rather than the swarthy thirtysomething reality). It’s as though the marketing department of the Harry Potter films had tried to project Dumbledore and Harry’s parents as the lead characters. Having said that, the cast is generally very good, with some affecting and powerful performances. The film is beautifully shot and lit – thanks to Roel Reiné, both director and director of photography – while the use of CGI to create entire seventeenth century fleets is usually effective and pretty convincing.

Don’t mention the flags

And then…flags. I’ve mentioned this before in this blog, after I saw the first trailer online, and I definitely don’t want to be ranked with those jolly souls who watch World War I movies simply to nit-pick about the wrong buttons and medals. But who on earth thought it was a good idea for the British fleet to have the Union Flag as an ensign, especially when it has the correct ensign (well, for a third of it anyway) as the jack? This was clearly no accidental error: somebody clearly thought that Dutch audiences wouldn’t recognise ships as British unless the Union Flag was displayed as prominently as possible. A similarly odd approach seems to have been adopted to costume. For all the principal characters, and the vast majority of extras, the costumes are pretty much as authentic as they can be. So why suddenly go off piste and dress William of Orange’s servants in late eighteenth century outfits, possibly a job lot left over from The Madness of King George, and have Mary Stuart sporting a ruff that would have looked old-fashioned on her namesake Mary Queen of Scots, plus a hairstyle drawn straight from the Bride of Frankenstein?

Her Majesty Queen Mary II, looking a bit ruff.
Her Majesty Queen Mary II, looking a bit ruff.

 

Third, the ‘author of historical fiction’ hat (except that, of course, authors can’t afford hats): 

The characters, with the obvious exception of Dance’s Charles II, are well drawn. De Ruyter himself comes across as a soulmate of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey: bumbling and a bit out of his depth ashore (at least early on in the film), but a real lion at sea. The scriptwriters take liberties by having him swinging from a rope, a la Errol Flynn, to board a British warship, and personally leading his Marines in a night attack at Chatham, but at the end of the day, I’ve been there and done that myself in my own books, so I’m certainly not going to throw stones. The filmmakers’ politics shine through: Johan de Witt, the republican leader, is undoubtedly the second hero of the film, while both of the princes, Charles II and William III, are presented as devious and untrustworthy (although William is given grudging praise for saving his country from the French in 1672, decisively ordering the cutting of the dykes while his ministers vacillate). And a warning to those of gentle dispositions – little is left to the imagination when it comes to the film’s portrayal of the shocking fate of de Witt and his brother. Imagine The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in a time before chainsaws.

Topless, therefore French
Topless, therefore French

Unfortunately, the script varies between powerful dialogue and real historical insight on the one hand, and over-the-top melodrama on the other. Charles II’s exchanges with his French mistress (nude, naturally, just because she’s French) are frankly risible, while Johan de Witt’s speech on taking office as raadpensionaris (or, as the classic subtitling cop-out puts it, ‘prime minister’) put me in mind of Bill Pullman’s speech as the President in Independence Day, and Mel Gibson’s infamous ‘Freedom!’ speech in Braveheart. Of course, this might have been exactly what the scriptwriters intended…

 

And putting on all three hats at once:

Watch this film, and you’ll probably come away thinking the Anglo-Dutch wars, which took place within a twenty-two year timespan, lasted for roughly six months. De Ruyter’s children don’t age: in fact, his son Engel, a weedy adolescent throughout the film, was a senior captain in his own right by the end of the film’s time period. The film begins with the battle of Scheveningen in 1653, then time travels forward by twelve years (thus omitting, for instance, the Restoration in England, or De Ruyter’s own campaigns in Africa). We shoot through the second war: the Four Days battle of 1666 lasts for fifteen minutes, tops. Then, hey, Charles II signs a treaty with Louis XIV to invade the Netherlands (1670), and before you can say ‘Edam’, they’re at war (1672)! And so we sprint through the battle of the Texel – which seems to have been ‘modified’ by artistic licence, so that the fate which eventually befalls the same French admiral in the West Indies in 1678 now takes place on a Dutch beach in 1673 instead – to De Ruyter being sent on a kamikaze mission to the Mediterranean in 1676, where he meets his death on the exact same day that William of Orange marries Charles II’s niece. 

Of course, this is a common issue in historical films, and in a way, film-makers, even more than novelists, have very little choice in the matter if they’re going to tell a long and complex story within a finite span. The first film I ever reviewed was the Richard Harris / Alec Guinness Cromwell (when I was thirteen, in the school newspaper), and my principal criticism was exactly the same: Look, Cromwell’s just become an MP (1628)! Oops, here we are at the battle of Edgehill (1642)! A few weeks later (apparently) – it’s Naseby (1645)! Another few weeks – gosh, the execution of Charles I (1649)! Wait another 10 minutes of screen time – Cromwell becomes Lord Protector (1653)! Is he nearly dead yet…? At the time, my thirteen year old self was outraged by this cavalier treatment of the chronology. Now, my (slightly) older novelist self is rather more laid back about such things, so long as a good story, true to the spirit of the original, is being told. Which, in this case, it definitely is.

So, yes, Admiral is flawed: but there’s also a tremendous amount to like about it, and it’s certainly a worthy effort. Moreover, if the Dutch can get a worldwide success out of it (its international sales were excellent), then surely British filmmakers ought to do well with a new version of the Nelson story, and why has Hollywood only ever made one film about John Paul Jones – as long ago as 1959, with Robert Stack as JPJ and Bette Davis as Catherine the Great?

(While checking that I was correct about that last point, I came across the bizarre fact that a screenplay was actually written for an earlier film version of his life. In 1923. By – wait for it – one Franklin Delano Roosevelt.)

As a representation of seventeenth century naval warfare and history on screen, then, Admiral is about as good as we’re likely to get – until, of course, that far off day when Gentleman Captain: The Movie (a Pico Pictures production) comes along.

Filed Under: Naval historical fiction, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Admiral Movie, Anglo-Dutch wars, Battle of the Texel

The Film and the Facts: About the Movie Michiel de Ruyter

11/05/2015 by J D Davies

I’m delighted to welcome a distinguished guest blogger this week, to bring relief from the recent overdose of politics! Gijs Rommelse is one of the pre-eminent Dutch maritime and political historians of the early modern period, being the author of The Second Anglo-Dutch War: International Raison d’état, Mercantilism and Maritime Strife, the co-author with Roger Downing of A Fearful Gentleman: Sir George Downing in The Hague, 1658-72, and co-editor with David Onnekink of Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe, 1650-1750. He is also the editor of Holland Historisch Tijdschrift, in which the Dutch version of the following review first appeared.

The Battle of Kijkduin / the Texel, 1673, by Willem Van de Velde the elder. Union flags as jacks, ensigns at the stern, as they should be...
The Battle of Kijkduin / the Texel, 1673, by Willem Van de Velde the elder. Union flags as jacks, ensigns at the stern, as they should be…

I’ve mentioned the lavish new Dutch film about the great 17th century admiral Michiel de Ruyter in an earlier blog on this site. Although it seems to have reached the USA and even China, there’s still no sign of its English subtitled version, titled Admiral, in British cinemas (or DVD shops) – but then, we’re most definitely the bad guys in this, so perhaps the distribution company reckons there won’t be too much of an audience. Consequently, all I’ve seen of the film are some stills and its rather impressive trailer, embedded below at the end of Gijs’s review. However, even this limited view enables me to add a couple more jarring notes from a British perspective. Quite why the film-makers decided to show British warships flying the Union flag as an ensign is beyond me, especially as they seem to be flying ensigns as jacks…and as for casting 68 year old Charles Dance as King Charles II, who would have been at most 43 years old in the period covered by the film, presumably this was some sort of ploy to pack in Dance’s fans from Game of Thrones, as I suggested in this blog a few months back. But I’ll reserve further judgement until I see the film in its entirety, and will hand over in the meantime to Gijs – with big thank you’s to him both for his permission to reproduce this translation of his review on this site, and for his generous mention of my essay on British perceptions of de Ruyter!

***

A lieutenant-admiral in a naval battle, sabre in hand, swinging over on a rope to an English ship to personally kill a dozen enemies? Prince William III of Orange forcing De Ruyter, through blackmail and threats against his family, to sail to the Mediterranean to commit suicide in a battle against a larger French fleet, because the Prince, prompted by the Rotterdam schemer Johan Kievit, had come to regard the legendary naval commander as the heir of Johan de Witt’s republican heritage? The highly experienced French commander Abraham Duquesne fooled in a childishly simple way by De Ruyter, and sailing his entire squadron onto a sandbank at Kijkduin? Cornelis Tromp gradually developing from a jealous, undisciplined prima donna to a hidden admirer of De Ruyter? These are just some examples of the historical inaccuracies and fabrications which the screenwriters of the new film spectacle Michiel de Ruyter employ to dramatize the heroism and tragedy in the life of the famous naval hero for the general public.

In about two and a half hours, the film tells the story of the career of the great admiral from Flushing during the three Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-1654, 1665-1667 and 1672-1674), and his eventual death at the hands of a French fleet in 1676. By placing De Ruyter on board Admiral Maarten Harpertsz Tromp’s flag ship Brederode moments before his demise during the Battle of Scheveningen (1653) and letting Tromp’s dying words be directed to him, the makers suggest that De Ruyter was sent by Tromp on a kind of sacred mission to be his successor and lead the Dutch fleet in battle. In reality, this would happen only in 1665, after De Ruyter’s predecessor Wassenaar van Obdam’s ship Eendracht had exploded during the Battle of Lowestoft.

The Battle of Lowestoft, 1665, by Van de Velde the elder (National Maritime Museum)
The Battle of Lowestoft, 1665, by Van de Velde the elder (National Maritime Museum)

It is true that Johan de Witt, who in 1653 took office as pensionary of the province of Holland, recognized in De Ruyter a formidable talent, someone who would be particularly suitable as a fleet commander. The film rightly makes clear that De Witt played a crucial role in the professionalization of the fleet organization and the building of a strong standing navy. A series of defeats during the First Anglo-Dutch War had shown that the old model – a limited number of purpose-built warships supplemented for the occasion by a much larger number of converted merchant ships – was completely outdated. The great statesman managed to create political support for the ambitious naval construction programme through his extensive network and also organized the financial resources required for this. Incidentally, the film also rightly raises the point that the construction of the standing navy was very much at the expense of the land army, and thus facilitated the invasion by the armies of Louis XIV in 1672. As the film reveals, in fact it was De Ruyter who repeatedly repelled the principal threat posed by the British and French, and thus played a crucial role in the survival of the Republic as an independent state.

Looking at the film, one would get the impression that the career of De Ruyter lasted only a few months, or at most two or three years. The admiral himself, played by Frank Lammers, and his wife and children, never appear a day older. This is because the political and military ramifications of the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars are essentially telescoped into one conflict. It is also striking that one of De Ruyter’s most famous feats is entirely missing from the film: namely, the reconquest of the slave stations of the West India Company (WIC) on the West African coast in 1664-1665. It was this voyage that led activists noisily to disrupt the gala premiere of the film on 26 January 2015 at the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam (see their Facebook page). According to their banners, De Ruyter was a ruthless advocate of slavery. Far-fetched and slightly unhistorical as this accusation might be, the noise of this protest did provide a nice counterbalance to the uncritical worship which De Ruyter invariably receives, and still enjoys in Dutch naval circles. The Royal Netherlands Navy was one of the partners of the production Farmhouse Film & TV.

De Ruyter's funeral procession, Amsterdam, 1677
De Ruyter’s funeral procession, Amsterdam, 1677

Particularly interesting in the film is the role of De Ruyter in the political struggle between the republicans, headed by the brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt, and Orangists seeking the elevation of Prince William III. In the film, De Ruyter is shown as a good friend of the republican brothers; moreover, his naval successes formed an essential pillar for their regime. By contrast, in the most authoritative Dutch literature, most notably the biography by Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, De Ruyter is presented as someone standing more or less outside the political fray, a man who had respect for De Witt and worked together with him, but who otherwise was really only interested in the fortunes of the dear fatherland. This picture seems to have carried over from 19th century studies, which were particularly interested in the glorious deeds of illustrious heroes, and a De Ruyter who was an opponent of Orangism would not fit this image. Interestingly, David Davies recently argued, in an English-language collection of essays on De Ruyter’s life, that far too little attention has been focused on his political role. The film is actually making this same point, although the film-makers were probably just trying to create a villainous opponent to make the story interesting for the viewer, rather than offering a serious reinterpretation. Anyway, maybe it is time that the history of the Dutch fleet in the 17th century should be seen explicitly through a prism of political ideology and polarization.

Finally, it should be noted that the viewer is treated to spectacular battle scenes with sizeable fleets, attractive locations, and a lavish view of the social, economic and religious life of the Dutch Golden Age.

 

Filed Under: Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Admiral Movie, Anglo-Dutch wars, Johann de Witt, Michiel De Ruyter, William III

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