Anglo-Dutch wars

Review: The New Tudor and Stuart Seafarers Gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

20/09/2018 by J D Davies

A disclaimer: this post has been written and posted rather more rapidly than usual, as it was only yesterday evening (19 September) that I went with the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed (aka Wendy) to the launch event for the four new permanent galleries at the National Maritime Museum. So apologies if there are more typos and glitches than usual…

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Launch events are tricky things, to which one sometimes goes with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. They tend to be full of people in suits who all know each other, are called names like Tristan or Miranda, and who call each other ‘dahling’. Then there’s the object of the launch. Will it actually be any good, or will one be left stranded in a sea of seemingly approving humanity, the only person in the vast space thinking that this particular emperor has no clothes? Such were my feelings as we rolled up to the National Maritime Museum for the official opening of its new permanent Endeavour galleries, which increase the museum’s exhibition space by 40% (and in the process, make it possible to do what had previously been impossible, namely to get around the entire building without using GPS).Obviously, I was particularly keen to see the new Tudor and Stuart Seafarers gallery, having been part of the focus groups that contributed ideas to it during the planning stage, and also being a contributor to the new book which ties in to the themes presented in the gallery. On the other hand, the NMM has quite a bit of form in getting things spectacularly wrong. Some of us have never forgiven it for infilling the lovely old Neptune Hall and inserting a ghastly mezzanine floor which seems to serve little purpose other than to provide sufficient space for corporate junketing, which was what the launch event ultimately was.

‘Blimey, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John have changed a bit’

Anyway, we were fortunate enough (or cunning enough) to position ourselves right in front of the stage on said mezzanine, so had a perfect view of the ‘warm-up’ act, an energetic set of Polynesian dancers – there because the galleries were being launched, and indeed are named, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the beginning of Captain Cook’s first voyage. We then had an equally prime view of the speakers, all of whom were, in their turn, mere warm-up acts for the guest of honour, bona fide national treasure Sir David Attenborough, whose every step to the podium was greeted with ecstatic applause and cheering worthy of any rock star. Inevitably, the great man focused on the new Pacific gallery, on the wonders of Polynesian culture and navigation, and on the current perilous state of the Pacific and all the other oceans. So warm was the reception for this speech that he ended by channelling his late brother Dicky and bowed theatrically to all corners of the room.

With the speeches over, it was time to explore the galleries – or, in our case, one gallery. Reader, if you came here seeking a review of the Pacific gallery, or the polar one, or, umm, ‘Sea Things’, then I suggest you go elsewhere. Time was tight due to the angst-inducing game of chance that’s otherwise called ‘the Thameslink railway timetable’, so although we passed briefly through Polar Worlds on the way out (looks good, stuff about Franklin and Scott of the Antarctic, wedding dress of the first woman to get married in Antarctica, etc), we spent all our time in the Tudor and Stuart seafaring gallery. Inevitably, too, that’s where the few like-minded souls who actually already knew a bit about sixteenth and seventeenth century maritime history gathered, so there was some chinwagging to do.

And the bit you’ve come here for, namely the verdict? Well, the gallery is quite small, but it’s perfectly formed, and certainly has plenty of interest and impact. As you go in (or go out, depending on your route), there’s a large display case with some of the outstanding 17th century ship models from the NMM’s collection. Old friends, these (regardless of Sir David’s damning recollection that when he first visited the museum as a small boy in the 1930s, it was full of nothing but ‘boring’ ship models), as indeed were quite a few of the exhibits – the most controversial probably being the manuscript journal of the Restoration seafarer Edward Barlow, which had made national headlines on the previous day following the discovery of the author’s previously unseen confession to rape. (Kudos to the NMM press department for placing the story in a way guaranteed to drum up extra interest in the new galleries, although presumably they had little to do with the equally serendipitous news story of the week, the likely discovery of the wreck of Cook’s Endeavour off the American coast.) Pepys is there, together with Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, but the principal focus of the gallery is on navigation and exploration, so the Anglo-Dutch wars, and even the Spanish Armada, are arguably secondary. There are some extraordinary Tudor navigational instruments, which makes one wonder how they actually lifted them, let along took bearings with them, and a profusion of wonderful sea charts. Inevitably, too, there’s a ‘pirates’ display, and interactive fun stuff for the younger visitors. The latter will probably also love the little model of a seventeenth century dockyard, complete with tiny moving holograms – a master shipwright, a sawyer, even a dog – and one suspects that their enthusiasm will outweigh the siren voices of those who protest that the ship on the stocks is being built in completely the wrong way. However, perhaps the most evocative items in the entire gallery are the items recovered from the wreck of the London, which blew up in the Thames estuary in 1665 (and which will also be central to a new exhibition at Southend museum, which I hope to get to see soon).

So yes, the Tudor and Stuart gallery is a well conceived, enjoyable, informative, and thoroughly welcome addition to what modern parlance would term the museum’s ‘offer’. Indeed, when taken together with the newly refurbished Queen’s House, the seventeenth century and its naval history are arguably now front and centre of the National Maritime Museum’s permanent displays, and although I might be just a little biased, I can’t but applaud that state of affairs enthusiastically!

Enough words, though. Here are some pictures to give you a flavour of what it’s like…and I certainly intend to get back to Greenwich soon with my tourist hat on, to take a look in the other new galleries!

‘These foreigners, they come over here, they take our ships…’

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Next week, this blog returns to one of its core purposes, namely raising awareness about, and providing new information regarding, seventeenth century naval history. Guest blogger Frank Fox, the leading authority on Stuart warships and their deployment, returns with a definitive listing of the British fleet at the Battle of Solebay, 28 May 1672 – a major contribution to the study of the Anglo-Dutch wars. When the post is published, though, I’ll actually be in Trnava, Slovakia, for reasons previously alluded to on this site. Expect to hear more about my trip in the near future!

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.

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?

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 n^thdegree, 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Shortening of Sail After the Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665

03/06/2015 by J D Davies

To mark the 350th anniversary of the battle, I’ve been tweeting the key events at the appropriate times during the day. However, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the battle doesn’t lend itself readily to Twitter. After destroying the Dutch flagship during the day’s action – a brief description of which can be found here – the Duke of York’s fleet began to pursue the Dutch, who were in considerable confusion and lacked a proper command structure. During the night of 3-4 June, though, the fleet was ordered to shorten sail. Why this happened has always been something of a mystery. Here’s what I wrote in Pepys’s Navy; I believe I’m right in saying that I was the first historian to find and cite Brouncker’s justification of his actions. After the references, I’ve added my fictional account from The Blast That Tears The Skies, as witnessed by the future admiral Edward Russell, serving as a volunteer on Matthew Quinton’s ship, but temporarily aboard the flagship Royal Charles after carrying despatches to the Duke of York. (In reality, Russell went to sea for the first time in the following year.)

The Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, showing the 'Royal Charles' and the 'Eendracht'. Hendrik van Minderhout. National Maritime Museum — The Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, showing the ‘Royal Charles’ and the ‘Eendracht’. Hendrik van Minderhout. National Maritime Museum

The narrow escape of the heir to the throne may explain the strange failure to follow up the crushing victory of Lowestoft, and to turn it into a complete annihilation of Dutch maritime power. The British fleet shortened sail during the night, supposedly because a courtier on the flagship, Henry Brouncker, deluded the flag captain, John Harman, and the ship’s master, John Cox, into believing that he was relaying the (sleeping) duke’s orders to that effect. It was subsequently suggested by the Earl of Clarendon that Brouncker, ‘a disreputable friend (and alleged pimp) of James’, had promised Clarendon’s daughter, the duchess of York, that he would bring her husband home safely, or else that he acted unilaterally to preserve the life of the heir to the throne (and, by implication, his own, as satirists and politicians were quick to point out)[i]. The matter was investigated in Parliament in October 1667 and April 1668, when, with the finger of suspicion pointing firmly in his direction, Brouncker panicked and fled abroad[ii]. His ex post facto defence, written from Paris in June 1668, made no mention of the duchess, but accused Harman, Cox and the other witnesses of perjury and contradicting each other. Brouncker implied that he was merely passing on the duke’s order not to engage during the night, which was then misinterpreted by Harman and Cox as an order to shorten sail; he also claimed that Cox did not sooner put on sail again because the night was so dark, and it was impossible to distinguish enemy and friendly lights[iii].

Regardless of Brouncker’s actions and subsequent justifications of them, it was clear that some ships on the British side would have found it difficult to mount a hot pursuit on the night of 3-4 June. Sandwich’s Royal Prince had to slow down to replace her main topsail, which had been ‘shot to pieces’, while the Bonadventure, which had spent almost all her powder and shot, had to lay by in the night to mend her rigging, ‘having every running rope in the ship shot, and [i.e. as well as] most of our main yard and bowsprit and spritsail yard’[iv]. Even so, none of this should have been sufficient to prevent a general chase being ordered. Up to a point, the failure to do so can be attributed to the clearly confused chain of command aboard the flagship and to Brouncker himself; whether he was acting maliciously or inadvertently is effectively irrelevant. However, Brouncker’s suggestion that James, who must have been exhausted and in some degree of shock after his narrow escape, gave an ambiguous order and then expected his subordinates to second-guess his meaning is entirely in keeping with the duke’s personality and subsequent track record as an admiral (he did something similar at [the Battle of]Solebay [28 May 1672][v]) and as king. As it was, the fleet only returned to a ‘running posture’ at about 4 a.m. on 4 June, too late to prevent the more northerly remnant of the Dutch fleet, commanded by Tromp and Evertsen, getting through the Texel sea-gate at about noon[vi].

[i] J R Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, 158.

[ii] J D Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy, 150, 156.

[iii] British Library, Additional MS 75,413, piece 9.

[iv] Sandwich Journal, Navy Record Society, 228; Lincolnshire Archives Office, MS Jarvis 9/1/A/1, log of Christopher Gunman.

[v] Journals and Narratives of the Third Dutch War, Navy Records Society, 175.

[vi] National Maritime Museum, WYN/13/6.

And now, from The Blast That Tears The Skies…

Beneath a brilliant orange dawn, the sea was empty. Of the Dutch fleet, there was no sign.

That could mean only one thing: they had got through the sea-gates. Somehow, we had let them get away.

I had been summoned to the quarterdeck in the middle of the night, at about two in the morning, when the great stern lanterns aboard the Royal Charles had flickered the signal that she was shortening sail. I had been in a dead sleep for perhaps three hours, far too little to be properly rested, and had sprung from my sea-bed forgetting my wounded foot, which screamed a reminder to me as it struck the deck. Thus I had limped onto the quarterdeck in a confused state, noted the action of the flagship, relayed its order to my own officers and thus to the hands aloft, who had promptly set about adjusting the clew-lines and the like, and had not really pondered its consequences before returning to my slumber. But when I returned to the deck at dawn, expecting the imminent resumption of the battle, I realised at once that all was wrong – beginning with the assumptions I had made in the middle of the night.

The Royal Charles might have ordered a shortening of sail because we were in danger of over-running the Dutch in the night. Well, not so,as was now all too evident.

The Royal Charles might have ordered a shortening of sail because our scouts had seen the Dutch do the same. Also not so, equally evidently.

The Royal Charles might have ordered a shortening of sail because the Dutch had already escaped within their sea-gates, and we were in danger of being blown onto their lee shore. Plainly not so, for we were still too far out to sea and with plenty of sea-room.

Thus either the Dutch fleet had been spirited away by their ally Beelzebub, or, rather more likely, something terribly wrong had happened aboard the Royal Charles.

I was fortunate to learn the truth before almost any other man in the fleet, for later that morning, as we despondently sighted the masts of the Dutch safe behind Texel, Cherry Cheeks Russell returned aboard the Merhonour and breathlessly recounted all he had seen and heard. Realising the importance of his evidence, I set him at once to write down his account, albeit in his execrable spelling.

Russell had stayed all night upon the quarterdeck (or, as he wrote it, ‘kwotadek’) of the Royal Charles, excited beyond measure by the sights and sounds around him – even by the spectacle of seamen scrubbing the deck clean of the blood of Lord Falmouth and the rest – and eager to catch sight of the Dutch by the first light of dawn. Thus he witnessed the arrival upon deck of Harry Brouncker, evidently intent upon conversation with Captain Cox, the sailing master, who had the watch.

‘New orders from His Royal Highness,’ said Brouncker officiously to Cox, ‘entrusted to me before he retired. He considers it too dangerous for the fleets to engage during the night, Captain, and wishes you to adjust your course accordingly.’

Cox, whom I knew as a capable and quick-witted man, looked at Brouncker suspiciously. ‘Adjust my course, Mister Brouncker? But if I adjust my course, every ship in the fleet has to adjust its own, dependent upon the signal from our lanterns.’ He looked up at the three huge structures at the stern, in each of which burned a fire that marked the flagship’s position by night.

‘That is what His Royal Highness means, Captain Cox. The fleet is not to engage by night.’

‘Then does he mean for us to shorten sail? Look at all the lights ahead of us, man. Some of them are our scouts, but most are the Dutch. We will be up with them well before dawn unless we shorten sail.’

Brouncker looked about him nervously, or so young Russell thought. ‘Well, then, Captain, that is what His Royal Highness means. The fleet to shorten sail.’

Cox stared steadily at him. ‘I’ll not order such a thing,’ he said. ‘I need to wake Captain Harman.’

He crossed the quarterdeck, knelt down and shook a bundle that lay between two culverins. The bluff, handsome John Harman, captain of the Royal Charles, stirred at once and got to his feet. His own cabin had been given over to Sir William Penn, but even so, Harman had an ample sea-bed awaiting him below; although he wore his hair long and dressed as a cavalier, in times of drama, like many of the true old tarpaulins, he still preferred to sleep on deck under one of the sheets that gave its name to his kind.

In hurried whispers, half-overheard by Russell, Cox apprised Harman of the situation. The two men approached Brouncker, and Harman said, ‘To shorten sail, Mister Brouncker? But that risks allowing the Dutch to escape us. You are certain that this is the Duke’s intention?’

‘I have said so, upon my word,’ blustered Brouncker. ‘We must not engage in the night. The fleet to shorten sail, if that is what it takes.’

Cox was anxious. ‘Perhaps we should wake Sir William,’ he said.

Harman frowned. ‘We could attempt to wake Sir William, but I doubt if it would do us any good.’

Every man on the quarterdeck, indeed probably every man on the Royal Charles – including even young Cherry Cheeks Russell – knew full well that the only way in which the Great Captain Commander could obtain some relief from the gout by night, and thus some precious sleep, was by taking some of the more potent drugs in the surgeon’s chest and washing them down with prodigious quantities of the strongest drink on the ship. Thus waking Sir William Penn would be akin to dragging the dead out of their graves before the sounding of the Last Trump.

‘In that case,’ said Cox, ‘surely we should awaken His Royal Highness, to seek confirmation of his intentions?’

Russell saw Brouncker gesticulate angrily at Cox. ‘Damnation, man, do you doubt my word? My word as a gentleman? I have told you His Royal Highness’s order, sir!’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Harman, ‘it would be best to have the Duke’s confirmation –‘

‘And do you really think he will thank you, Captain Harman, if you wake him and he finds you have done so merely to confirm an order that he has already given through me? What will that do to your prospects of becoming Admiral Harman, do you think?’ That struck home; by tradition, the captain of the fleet flagship had the first claim upon a vacant flag, and with Sansum dead, Harman’s path to promotion lay open, pending confirmation by the Duke of York.

Yet Cox and Harman clearly remained unconvinced. Russell overheard snatches of their conversation: they were worried by the proximity of the Dutch and the dangers of a night engagement, but equally alarmed at the prospect of slowing the fleet too much and allowing the Dutch to escape.

As the two officers debated, Cherry Cheeks watched Brouncker become increasingly agitated. At last he strode up to Cox and Harman and almost bellowed in their faces.

‘Think upon what you do here tonight!’ cried the red-faced courtier. ‘For all we know, the plague or a fanatic’s bullet might have carried away Charles Stuart this day, and the man sleeping beyond that bulkhead might at this very moment be King of England, by the Grace of God! Are you really prepared to deny the will of Majesty, Captain Cox? Captain Harman, are you?’

Cox and Harman exchanged one last, despairing glance. Then Harman said decisively, ‘Very well, then. Captain Cox, you will give the orders for the Royal Charles to shorten sail. I will see to the transmission of that order to the fleet. May God grant that we do the right thing.’

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!

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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)

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 19^thcentury 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.

Texel 341, Part 2

18/08/2014 by J D Davies

And now for Part 2 of my account of the Battle of the Texel/Kijkduin, 11/21 August 1673…the same caveats apply as last week!

***

Ironically, one aspect of the original strategy agreed by Charles and Rupert before the fleet sailed in July worked almost exactly as they had planned it – one of the very few such occurrences in the three Anglo-Dutch wars. By the beginning of August, William and de Ruyter were under growing pressure from the Amsterdam merchants and the VOC to safeguard the returning merchant fleets. On 2 August, William visited his fleet off Scheveningen and persuaded de Ruyter of the necessity of giving battle, even though, as they both knew, their fleet only possessed about two-thirds of the Anglo-French force’s numerical strength.⁴² The Dutch fleet moved north; by 8 August the two forces’ scouts were in sight of each other, but high seas kept the main fleets at anchor for two days, during which time the potential threat to the republic’s trade was amply illustrated by the capture of the lone VOC ship Papenburg by the French warship Bourbon. The combined fleet weighed anchor at 6a.m. on the tenth and steered south-east with the advantage of the wind, closing steadily on de Ruyter. At four that afternoon de Ruyter tacked to avoid engaging, put on sail and rapidly shot ahead, with the combined fleet in pursuit.⁴³ Given the hour, Rupert decided not to engage on that day. The (French) van squadron was ordered to continue to steer south-east until they came to the ten-fathom line where they were to change course to the south-west in order to keep the wind.⁴⁴

By one means or another, by the morning of 11 August the combined fleet had completely lost the considerable tactical advantage which it had possessed the day before: as dawn broke, the allied captains found that the Dutch had gained the wind during the night and were bearing down on them. Even de Ruyter seemed surprised to find his enemy to leeward of him.⁴⁵ The possible explanations for the allies’ losing the wind were and are contentious, especially as they provided part of the argument for the subsequent attack on the conduct of the French, and will be considered in due course. However, it is clear that one of the most important factors in explaining the change of circumstances was that the wind itself had changed during the night, swinging around from north-east roughly to south-east – a change which would have sufficed in itself to give the Dutch the wind, regardless of any manoeuvring on the part of either force.⁴⁶ As it was, the combined fleet tacked several times during the night, finally making a tack between six and seven in the morning which set it on a course roughly to the south-west, formed up into its line-of-battle but with the Dutch closing from the south-east, having got themselves between the combined fleet and the Dutch coast, roughly seven miles off Petten and Camperduin (not, in fact, the Texel, as was stated in many of the English and French accounts). To confront the three allied squadrons the Dutch had divided their fleet in a similar manner, with the Zeeland ships under Lieutenant-Admiral Bankert in the van opposite the French, a largely Rotterdam-based squadron under de Ruyter in the centre opposing Rupert’s red squadron, and the Amsterdam ships under Cornelis Tromp in the rear opposite Spragge’s blue squadron.⁴⁷ Between seven and nine the long lines-of-battle gradually converged and the battle began.

Another Van de Velde the Younger painting of the duel of the Gouden Leeuw and Royal Prince

The combined fleet’s line-of-battle, the good order of which had impressed several of its officers, began to break up almost immediately. The French in the van pressed ahead, trying to gain the wind from the Dutch (or so they subsequently claimed); conversely, shortly before eight Spragge ordered his blue squadron, in the rear, to back their sails to their masts, ostensibly to close his three divisions to each other but in reality to ensure that he could continue his personal duel with Tromp, a legacy of the second Anglo-Dutch war. Virtually the last words in Spragge’s journal, written up in the small hours of 11 August to conclude his account of the previous day’s events, are ‘he [Tromp] will, I hope, fall to my share in the Blue squadron tomorrow’.⁴⁸ As a result of these manoeuvres, the battle of the Texel effectively developed very quickly into three separate engagements – a fact which would later allow those who reported from each of the combined fleet’s three squadrons to claim that their actions had been correct and those of the other two had been wrong. In the admiral of the blue’s division, Spragge’s Royal Prince was engaged by Tromp’s Gouden Leeuw and a general engagement followed until about noon, with both the English and Dutch divisions sailing slowly southward before turning west and then north-west in the afternoon. Both the Prince and several of the ships near her suffered severe damage; the Prince lost the effective use of two of her masts and almost all her rigging, while ‘many valiant men [were] sent into the other world without any ceremony besides peals of thundering ordnance’.⁴⁹The Prince dropped out of the line at about eleven to effect repairs, the Royal Charles taking over her position. Captain Arthur Herbert’s Cambridge, immediately astern of her in the line, dropped out of the line twice during the same period due to damaged rigging, while the Advice lost her foretopmast and had six feet of water in her hold, forcing her crew to bail and pump continually. Spragge’s attempt at about noon to bring the Prince back into the line in order to launch a counter-attack against Tromp was thwarted by the rapid destruction of his recently-repaired main and mizzen masts, and he transferred his flag to the Saint George, which he immediately tried to interpose between Tromp and the crippled Prince. Finding the quality of the Saint George‘s gun crews to be totally unsatisfactory, or else because she, too, had become disabled (depending on whether one believes unofficial or official accounts), Spragge decided at about one to shift his flag again to the Royal Charles, ‘and stayed a little to take his flag with him…which some think was observed by the enemy, and occasioned the disaster that soon followed, for scarce was he got a cable’s length before the bullets began to fall thick about his boat, and one found easy passage through her to let in that good servant, bad master, the watery element’. Some of the boat’s crew managed to keep Spragge, a notoriously poor swimmer, afloat for a while, but when they were finally rescued it was found that although ‘they saved his body…his glorious soul had forsaken that habitation’.⁵⁰The loss of Spragge, or rather of the blue flag which had perished with him and the Saint George‘s boat, was an unmitigated disaster for his division, which now lacked any effective leadership. Tromp sought to take advantage of this by finishing off the Prince and made at least three concerted attacks on her in the first part of the afternoon, almost managing to secure his fireships to her; the boatswain only just managed to cut away the hooks of one of them from the ship’s foreshrouds, and the entire saga of the Prince‘s defensive fight under her captain, Thomas Fowler, came to be regarded as a classic of its type.⁵¹

Despite the undoubted heroics of her own crew, the saving of the Prince was attributable chiefly to the intervention of the two other divisions of the blue squadron – the rear-admiral’s division under Thomas Butler, earl of Ossory, in the Saint Michael, and the vice-admiral’s division under Sir John Kempthorne, which had been stationed in the rear of the entire fleet. Between eight in the morning and midday, Ossory’s division had been trading broadsides with the ships of the Amsterdam rear-admiral Jan de Haan. With considerable damage to her rigging, the Saint Michael and her division had come up to Spragge’s Royal Prince at about noon, at which time the wind veered to the south-west and gave the English ships the weather-gage. This was the moment when Spragge’s intention to counter-attack on the wind was rendered futile by the disability of the Prince and his own death shortly afterwards. Despite suffering even more damage to the Saint Michael’s masts and rigging, Ossory kept her close to the Prince, with some of his fireships in position to deter Tromp. At four that afternoon, with both Rupert’s and de Ruyter’s squadrons in sight bearing down from the south-west and with Tromp having abandoned his final attempts to fire the Prince, Ossory ordered the Hampshire and Ruby (later joined by the Pearl) to take the crippled flagship in tow.⁵² Meanwhile, the rear-admiral’s division of the blue, under Sir John Kempthorne, had been engaged with vice-admiral Isaac Sweers of the Witte Olifant and his division since the beginning of the battle, although both divisions had fallen well to leeward of the rest of their squadrons. Kempthorne’s Saint Andrew lost her main and foremasts early on and had to anchor, and the damage which he had sustained, so Kempthorne claimed, made it difficult for him to manoeuvre to the assistance of the Royal Prince in the early afternoon. Nevertheless, he tacked with the intention of attacking Tromp, but found he was supported by only three other ships of his division. Kempthorne claimed that he passed the Prince and tried to set his fireships onto Tromp but that too many other ships were in the way. After tacking once more, Kempthorne hove-to to repair his torn foresail before weathering Tromp and sailing on to join Rupert at about four.⁵³

For the red squadron, the morning had begun with the disconcerting spectacle of the white and blue squadrons disappearing ahead and astern, leaving them isolated to face what Rupert claimed was the whole of de Ruyter’s squadron and most of Banckert’s Zeeland squadron as well. From eight until twelve the red and its opponents followed a course roughly to the north-west, fighting all the time – an observer on the Royal Katherine, at the head of Rupert’s division, claimed that they had been the first ship to be hit, but that subsequently the Mary and Rupert’s flagship Sovereign had been particularly heavily engaged.⁵⁴ By midday Rupert’s and his vice-admiral, Harman’s, divisions had been weathered by a large Dutch force, with rear-admiral Sir John Chicheley some way to leeward. As a result, most of the red lay between two Dutch squadrons, one to windward and one to leeward of them, with de Ruyter’s flagship De Zeven Provincien almost in the Sovereign‘s wake; the Royal Katherine dropped back from her place in the line to protect her. Several attempted fireship attacks by both sides were abortive.⁵⁵ (Indeed, during the whole course of the battle of the Texel the English expended more fireships than in any other battle of the sailing ship era.⁵⁶) Shortly afterwards, ‘our disput had a seseation’ when Rupert veered away to join forces with Chicheley, and then sailed northwards to assist the blue, who were about four leagues away. De Ruyter, similarly, hoped to assist Tromp, so that the early afternoon witnessed the peculiar spectacle of the two fleets’ centre squadrons sailing north almost parallel to each other, but not firing a shot.⁵⁷

Between four and five, the red and blue joined forces. De Ruyter and Tromp launched another attempt to administer the coup de grace to the Royal Prince, but Rupert hastily improvised a new line-of-battle with the ships around him, interposing himself between the Dutch and Spragge’s old flagship and sending two fireships to thwart de Ruyter’s attack, so that a new general engagement began at about five. ‘The fight was very strong and close’, Rupert claimed, and it continued until about eight that evening, when the English squadrons withdrew to the west-north-west to take care of their disabled ships, and the Dutch bore off to the east, towards their own coast. Despite the severe damage to the Prince and the lesser damage to several other vessels, and the loss of Spragge, five other captains, and perhaps 500 seamen, Rupert claimed that he had gained the better of the engagement, and this boast was repeated in several accounts of the battle. It was regarded as a certainty that Kempthorne had sunk a Dutch seventy-gunner, but this was just as much a fiction as the Dutch claim to have sunk one of Rupert’s squadron. Although the Dutch had lost more senior officers, including two vice-admirals (Sweers and de Liefde), the claim to a ‘great victory’ in their journals was rather more justified, for as they immediately realised, they had achieved their objective of forcing the combined fleet away from their coast, ensuring that there could be no immediate landing (even if Charles II felt inclined to order one).⁵⁸ Nine days after the battle, William of Orange signed the three great treaties with the Emperor Leopold, the queen-regent of Spain and the duke of Lorraine, which virtually guaranteed the survival of the United Provinces. Just over a fortnight after the battle he undertook his first serious offensive, taking Naarden and thereby relieving some of the French pressure on Amsterdam. If the Texel had been a Dutch defeat, it is very difficult to see how William could have contemplated such significant moves as these.

A Dutch congregation took refuge in its church as the battle raged offshore: plaque at Huisduinen, North Holland

The conduct of the French squadron

As far as many of the Englishmen who had actually been present at the battle were concerned, let alone the vociferous francophobe elements ashore, the fact that the Texel quite plainly had not been the great victory they had wanted was due (at least in part) to the behaviour of the one remaining allied squadron in the battle, the French in the van. Even journals and accounts which were clearly written up immediately afterwards, several of them probably on the evening of the eleventh itself, contained the essential ingredients of the story which would be sweeping London for the following two or three months. Aboard the Royal Katherine, one of Captain George Legge’s servants saw the French at about six in the evening ‘above a leag to windward of us all and all the tyme of this our latter ingagmt the French never bore up a foot but looked one’.⁵⁹ In the log of the Crown, which had lain just ahead of Rupert’s flagship in the red squadron, Captain Richard Carter noted that

the French yn haveing the van of the fleet and the wind shifteing to ye SW they tacked and gott the wind of the enemy who made so little use of so greate an advanta yt they kept yr wind as neare as possible they could and to the best of my knowledge fired but very few Gunns after they had so great an advantage of doeing considerable service.⁶⁰

Rupert’s letters and his subsequent relation of the battle took the same line, his letter to Charles II on 17 August even containing a sketch of the situation at five or six in the afternoon of the battle, when the red and blue were starting to engage again but the French were standing apart, well to windward.⁶¹

Any attempt to interpret the conduct of the French at the battle of the Texel suffers from a particularly exaggerated case of the problem which to varying degrees besets the battle as a whole – not only was the interpretation of the facts open to debate, both at the time and since, but so too were many of the facts themselves. The ‘official’ version of the French squadron’s actions was contained in ‘the Relation from the White Squadron’, one of the three accounts published by authority on 17 August.⁶² In this, the French claimed that their rear-admiral, Martel, had attempted unsuccessfully to gain the wind of Bankert’s Zeeland squadron, and that d’Estrées had then broken through Bankert’s line between eleven and twelve in the morning, despite a narrow escape from Dutch fireships and the deaths of thirty men on his flagship, La Reine. Even the official account then passed over the actions of the French throughout the afternoon and evening with remarkable speed, claiming only that they had

pursued the enemy before the wind, and with all their sails, till half an hour past seven in the evening, when we found fifty of the enemy’s ships, who had rallied, and who durst not bear upon the prince’s squadron, because we had thewind of them, expecting only the Prince’s orders to do whatever his Highness should think fit. The Comte d’Estrées thinking he ought to keep the advantage of the wind, to renew the fight the next day, it being then already too late to engage afresh, without express orders from his Highness.⁶³

Like the English journals and accounts of the battle, several more detailed accounts of their part in the engagement were produced within the French squadron in the days immediately following the Texel. D’Estrées’ own account was essentially a more detailed version of what was to become the official French narrative, and this line was supported both by an anonymous relation written up on 12 August and another by Hérouard, major d’escadre of the French squadron. Indeed, it was Hérouard who made the first serious attempt to counter the barrage of criticism against his squadron when he had an audience with Charles II on 17 August.⁶⁴

Unfortunately for d’Estrées and for the Anglo-French alliance, this version of events was seriously undermined by the actions of the marquis de Martel. His journal for his flagship, the Royal Therese, formed the basis of the account which he subsequently sent to Rupert, which therefore came to form an essential part of Rupert’s criticisms of French conduct, and which was published with such devastating impact on English public opinion. According to Martel, the Dutch had employed only eight major ships and two fireships ‘pour amuser toute l’escadre de France’, and it is certainly the case that only this number of Zeeland ships, under vice-admiral Evertsen, were engaged with Martel’s van division in order to hinder any attempt by the French to tack; the rest of Banckert’s squadron soon dropped back to engage Rupert. Martel claimed that he had attempted to engage more vigorously, but had been thwarted by d’Estrées’ failure to support him. Indeed, he claimed that d’Estrées had secretly ordered the other captains in his division not to engage properly, and that by midday, when they had gained the wind of the entire Dutch fleet and Martel was keen to engage, d’Estrées for his part insisted they should stay clear of the main battle, at which Martel ‘shrugged up his shoulders’ and went along with his admiral’s orders.⁶⁵ To this damning indictment of d’Estrées Rupert was able to add the charge that he had ignored the signal of a blue flag at the mizzen peak, which he had hoisted at about five in the afternoon as a signal (so he claimed) for the rest of the fleet to fall into his wake, in accordance with the fighting instructions; indeed, both English and French accounts indicate that d’Estrées saw this signal but (according to the more charitable reports) he did not know what it meant and sent a messenger to Rupert to find out, thereby losing so much time that the opportunity to engage was gone.⁶⁶

The intensity of the criticism from both the English and Martel forced the French ambassador in London, Colbert de Croissy, and his political superiors in Paris, to attempt a damage limitation exercise and to undertake an extensive enquiry into the conduct of d’Estrées’ squadron. Indeed, the exhaustive nature of that enquiry, and the obvious concern to redeem the reputation of the French nation apparent in the letters of Colbert and his son, the navy minister Seignelay, gives the lie to the notion that ‘secret orders’ had been transmitted to d’Estrées from his government, perhaps even from Louis himself – apart from the obvious difficulty of implementing any such orders, the execution of which would have depended heavily on decisions of the Dutch rather than the French, the obsession of the king and ministers with their honour and ‘gloire’ makes it highly improbable that they would have ordered d’Estrées to act in such a blatantly dishonourable way, especially at a time when further English participation in the war was in the balance and public opinion was already hostile to France.⁶⁷ By the beginning of September, Seignelay and Colbert were making every effort to obtain accurate information on the actions of the French squadron from its captains and others who had been present during the battle, and Colbert de Croissy was fighting a valiant rearguard action to counter the effects of Rupert’s and Martel’s relations. Both Seignelay and (later) d’Estrées attempted point-by-point rejoinders to each of Rupert’s criticisms of the French squadron.⁶⁸ It was unfortunate for the French ministers and sea-officers that their detailed investigation was not made known English public opinion (which would probably have ignored it if it had been, of course), for even by the early days of September, that opinion was starting to shift slightly in a way which would in fact have been supported by the evidence being produced in France.

Even in the immediate aftermath of the battle, a few voices had been raised to question the conduct of individual English captains and, indeed, that of Rupert himself. The veteran admiral Sir Thomas Allin, writing from Yarmouth on 15 August in response to the first news of the battle, castigated the English as much as the French, and it was not only Rupert who censured the conveniently dead Spragge for disobeying orders and falling astern with the blue squadron in order to engage Tromp.⁶⁹ On 30 August Arlington wrote to Essex that, although Rupert had been blaming d’Estrées and the French, ‘our English squadrons were not altogether Exempt from factions on their part, they also blaming one another, in a word wee lost an infinite advantage upon the ennemy although our strength was much superior to theirs by these divisions amongst us’.⁷⁰ Factional point-scoring and settling of scores was endemic within the English officer-corps from August 1673 onwards. Sir John Kempthorne was criticised for not doing more to save the Prince and replied by attacking the other flag-officer of the blue squadron, the earl of Ossory, who petitioned the king and eventually won a retraction from Kempthorne.⁷¹ Rupert implicitly attacked most of the captains of the fleet by singling out only fourteen for praise – an action which offended even one of the fourteen and one of the prince’s own divisional captains, George Legge⁷²– and he explicitly criticised his own rear-admiral, Sir John Chicheley, although the contemporary drawings of the battle made for Legge suggest that Chicheley’s conduct had been exemplary.⁷³The bitter factional feud culminated in the publication of the anonymous pamphlet An Exact Relation of the Several Engagements in the autumn of 1673, which made a detailed defence of Rupert and his clients, criticising several of the other flag officers, the French (predictably), the navy board, the ordnance office, and even the duke of York and Charles II himself. Its account of the Texel was based closely on Rupert’s own relation, supplemented by Martel’s, and on the whole it is this version which has become the accepted orthodoxy about the battle.⁷⁴ However, both the other French and several of the English accounts present a very different picture, and one with a very different villain.

Notes

42 Newsletter from Amsterdam, 29 July / 7 Aug 1673; ‘Avis de Hollande’, 1/10 Aug 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 294-6; P Blok, The Life of Admiral de Ruyter, trans. G J Renier (1933), 340-1. Cf the perceptive comments of Henry Coventry about the importance of the VOC ships to the Dutch: Coventry to Curteus, 11 Aug 1673: Coventry MS 82, fo 129.

43 Scout ships: PRO ADM 51/3932 (log of Pearl). Capture of Papenburg: inter alia, PRO ADM 106/284/151, 168. The most detailed accounts of fleet movements, wind directions and courses steered, 8-10 Aug 1673, are Bod, Rawl MS C213 (log of Henrietta), PRO ADM 51/3817 (log of Crown), Journals and Narratives 310 (Legge, Royal Katherine), 330 (Spragge, Royal Prince), 352-3 (Narbrough, Saint Michael).

44 This, at least, is the interpretation presented in ‘The True Relation of the Battle’, BL Harleian MS 6845 fos 158-9 and in ‘A Relation of the Battle…’, Bod, Tanner MS 42, fos 21-2, both printed in Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 304. Both the veracity of these sources and their interpretations of Rupert’s decisions can be questioned. The Tanner MS account is noticeably inaccurate in the timings of many events during the battle, and both accounts take a strongly pro-Rupert line.

45 De Ruyter’s reaction: his journal entry for 11/21 August 1673 in Algemeen Rijksarchief, Collectie de Ruyter, inventory 1.10.72.01/20, fo. 64 (printed in J R Bruijn, ed., De oorlogvoering ter zee in 1673 in journalen en andere stukken (Groningen, 1966), 89). English reactions & descriptions of their course, etc, at daybreak on 11 August can be found in the journals (except Spragge’s) cited in n43 above and n47 below.

46 For purely factual accounts of the change of wind, free of any criticism of the French or Rupert, see inter alia ‘P B’ to Sir Charles Lyttelton, 12 Aug. 1673: PRO SP 29/336/243 (accurate summary in CSPD 1673, 490); PRO ADM 51/588 (log of Mary Rose); PRO ADM 51/3817 (log of Crown); Bod, Add MS C213 (log of Henrietta).

47 Tacks during night & position at daybreak on 11 August: Bod, MS Add C213; Bod, Carte MS 38 fo 30r (account by Fowler, Royal Prince); Journals and Narratives, 310-11 (Legge), 353-4 (Narbrough); Staffs RO, MS D(W)1778/Ii/355, 9th, 14th, 15th & 17th documents in folder (respectively, an anonymous discussion of ‘The Reasons how the Dutch came to get the Weather Gage of our Fleet’, and parts of journals by Francis Hamond, Richard Streete and Charles Stephens, respectively midshipmen and master’s mate aboard Royal Katherine). There is some dispute about the exact number and timings of the combined fleet’s tacks, but this is hardly surprising given the complexity of night manoeuvring relatively close to shore and the added complication of the change of wind – moreover, the degree of confusion within and between the journals is entirely consistent with the fact that by dawn, the fleet’s sailing order was in considerable disarray. Division of Dutch fleet: Bruijn, Oorlogvoering, 152, 205-9.

48 Quotation: Journals and Narratives, 330. Quality of line-of-battle: Journals and Narratives, 354; Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 305. Spragge’s orders to Blue squadron: Bod, Carte MS 38, fo 30r (Fowler); Journals and Narratives 354-5 (Narbrough). Spragge’s ostensible and actual motives for backing his sails were discussed in detail by Legge, Staffs RO MS D(W)1778/Ii/355, 23rd document in folder, fo 13 (manuscript pamphlet by Legge – provenance discussed by J D Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins (Oxford 1991), 167-8) and this clearly formed the basis for the (unattributed) analysis of Spragge’s tactics by Sir J S Corbett: A Note on the Drawings in the Possession of the Earl of Dartmouth Illustrating the Battle of Solebay, 28 May 1672, and the Battle of the Texel, 11 August 1673 (NRS 1908), 37.

49 Quotation: ‘P B’ to Sir Charles Lyttelton from Royal Prince, 12 August 1673: CSPD 1673, 490.

50 Quotations: ibid., 491. Surviving accounts from the admiral of the blue’s division: ibid., 490-2; PRO, ADM 51/13, pt 1 (log of Advice); Captain John Dawson, Advice, to Navy Board, 18 Aug 1673: ADM 1/3545, p 197; Bod, Carte MS 38, fos. 30-1, 34-5 (accounts by Fowler, Royal Prince, and Herbert, Cambridge); BL, Egerton MS 928 fos 143-4 (another account by Fowler); account by Captain Guy, Henrietta Yacht: PRO SP 29/336313 (accurate summary in CSPD 1673, 523. For the blue squadron as a whole, cf also the official ‘Relation’: Journals and Narratives, 392-4.

51 Cf Fowler and ‘P B’ accounts from Royal Prince cited in n50. For the perpetuation of the story of the Prince‘s defence see, inter alia, Corbett, Drawings, 43.

52 Surviving accounts of the rear-admiral of the blue’s division: Journals and Narratives, 354-62 (journal of Narbrough, Saint Michael); an earlier and briefer summary of the battle by Narbrough is BL Harleian MS 6845, fos 156-7, printed in Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 310-12. Most accounts only give two the first two frigates named towing the Prince, but it is clear that the Pearl joined the tow later: CSPD 1673, 523; PRO ADM 51/3932 (log of Pearl).

53 Surviving accounts of the vice-admiral of the blue’s division: BL Egerton MS 928, fo. 146 (account by Kempthorne, Saint Andrew). The journal for the flagship of Kempthorne’s adversary, Sweers, is printed in Bruijn, Oorlogvoering, 152-4.

54 Staffs R.O., MS D(W)1778/Ii/355, 17th document in folder (account by Richard Streete).

55 Surviving accounts from the red squadron (all from admiral’s division with the exception of BL Egerton MS 840B, York, and PRO ADM 51/588, Mary Rose, the former of which was probably in the vice-admiral’s division – see Appendix – and the latter of which was definitely in the rear-admiral’s division; both of these journals are almost entirely navigational): Rupert’s relation, printed both in CSPD 1673, 520-2 and Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 306-9; sources listed in n44 above; Journals and Narratives, 311 (Legge, Royal Katherine), 390-1 (the official ‘Relation’); Staffs R.O. MS D(W)1778/Ii/355 (accounts by Legge and several of his midshipmen and master’s mates aboard Royal Katherine); PRO, ADM 51/ 3817 (log of Crown). Journals by de Ruyter on De Zeven Provincien and his son Engel de Ruyter, captain of the Waesdorp – both in the squadron opposing the red – are printed in Bruijn, Oorlogvoering, 89-90, 184-5 respectively.

56 D Hepper, British Warship Losses in the Age of Sail 1650-1859 (Rotherfield 1994), 10-11 and passim. Cf also the comments of W Maltby, ‘Politics, Professionalism, and the Evolution of Sailing-Ship Tactics’, The Tools of War: Instruments, Ideas and Institutions of Warfare, 1445-1871, ed J A Lynn (Urbana, 1990), 57-8. (I am grateful to Drs P Le Fevre and R Harding for this reference.)

57 Quotation: document cited in n54 above.

58 Quotation: CSPD 1673, 521. Latter stages of battle: journals cited in ns 50, 52, 53 and 55 above. English & Dutch losses: Journals and Naratives, 52-3. Dutch perspective: Bruijn, Oorlogvoering, 89-90, 154, 185; newsletter from Middelburg, 16/26 Aug 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 333-4. A good example of the wildly exaggerated English claims can be found in ibid., 306.

59 Quotation: document cited in n54 above.

60 PRO, ADM 51/3817.

61 PRO, SP 29/336/259.

62 Journals and Narratives, 391-2.

63 Ibid., 392.

64 D’Estrees and Herouard accounts published in Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 312-16, 325-8; anonymous account in ibid., 328-30.

65 Martel’s accounts are printed in ibid., 316-25 (quotation from p324).

66 Cf Rupert’s relation: CSPD 1673, 521-2; Martel to Colbert de Croissy, 27 Aug/6 Sept 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 340-1; sources quoted in n93 below.

67 See Ekberg, Failure, 163.

68 Seignelay to d’Estrees, 30 Aug/9 Sept, 7/17 Sept 1673; same to Colbert de Croissy, 7/17 Sept 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 342-3, 347-9; Colbert to Seignelay, 31 Aug/10 Sept 1673, ibid., 351-4; rejoinders by d’Estrees and Seignelay to Rupert’s allegations, ibid., 355-8. Cf ibid, Colbert and Seignelay to d’Estrees, 23 July/2 Aug and 4/14 Aug 1673 (ibid., 293, 299) for earlier expressions of the French government’s desire for ‘la gloire’ from its fleet;

69 Allin to Navy Board, 15 Aug 1673: PRO ADM 106/284/158; Henry Coventry to Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine, 18 Aug 1673: Coventry MS 82, fo 129v.

70 BL Stowe MS 202, fos 334-5.

71 See Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, 171-2.

72 Staffs R.O., MS D(W)1778/Ii/355, 19th document in folder (unsigned, undated list of criticisms of Rupert).

73 Names of the fourteen officers and Rupert’s criticisms of Chicheley are contained both in his relation (CSPD 1673, 520-2) and in The Exact Relation, printed in Journals and Narratives, 382-5.

74 Ibid., 380-6. Several MS copies of the pamphlet survive, eg in Staffs R.O. MS D(W)1778/Ii/355. For its appearance and impact see ibid., 1st, 22nd and 23rd documents in folder.

Texel 341, Part 1

11/08/2014 by J D Davies

Today, 11 August 2014, marks the 341st anniversary of the sea battle known in Britain as the Battle of the Texel and in the Netherlands as the Battle of Kijkduin. (The date was 21 August on the calendar then in use in the Netherlands.) This proved to be the last battle of the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century, and it’s always fascinated me. Although it was indecisive, it has most things one could wish for in a sea fight: high drama, personal conflicts and tragedies, and an abiding ‘conspiracy theory’, centred on the notion that the French squadron, forming one third of the combined fleet under the command of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, was under secret orders from King Louis XIV to effectively withdraw from the action and leave the British and Dutch to fight each other to a standstill. I intended for several years to write a book about the battle, and, indeed, this proposal was accepted by Boydell and Brewer. Unfortunately, both this project and a related one (to produce a volume of contemporary views of the battles of the third Anglo-Dutch war for the Navy Records Society) were overtaken by events – especially the Quinton series, which meant I no longer really had the time to carry out the sort of intensive academic research that the book would demand. But who knows, maybe I’ll return to it one day, perhaps in time for the 350th anniversary in 2023!

In the meantime, I’m going to use my next three posts to publish online the existing draft of my account of the battle. This was originally in article form, and would have formed the basis of a greatly expanded and more detailed account in the book that I intended to write. It also formed the basis of the much briefer account of the battle that appears as Chapter 52 of my award-winning book, Pepys’s Navy. In so doing, I need to provide a few caveats. This was very much an incomplete work in progress; I’ve done little new work on this in at least ten years, so it takes no account of new research that either I’ve undertaken, or that others have published, during that time. (For example, if I was writing this account now I’d certainly want to refer to the likes of Charles-Edouard Levillain’s excellent Vaincre Louis XIV. Angleterre, Hollande, France. Histoire d’une relation triangulaire (1665-1688), 2010, and Matthew Glozier’s biography of Marshal Schomberg; while the cognoscenti of such things will observe that my unmodified notes still refer to the National Archives as the Public Record Office!) Not all of the references are in place, and others are incomplete. What’s more, it’s not been through the usual process of checks that such a work would undergo, e.g. review by a team of critical readers. As a result, I have no doubt that this account contains many errors and flaws; but I hope that even in this very rough state, it’ll be of interest to some of you! So without further ado, here’s the first part: my account of the project to launch an Anglo-French seaborne invasion of the Netherlands in the summer of 1673.

Willem Van De Velde the Younger's great painting of the Battle of the Texel, showing the duel between Tromp in the Gouden Leeuw and Spragge in the Royal Prince. — Willem Van De Velde the Younger’s great painting of the Battle of the Texel, showing the duel between Tromp in the Gouden Leeuw and Spragge in the Royal Prince.

***

The battle of the Texel, known to the Dutch (more accurately) as the battle of Kijkduin, was fought on 11 August 1673 between the combined Anglo-French fleet under Prince Rupert of the Rhine and the Dutch fleet under Michel Adrianszoon de Ruyter. Although no major ships were lost on either side, it proved to be a tactical success for the Dutch; it also proved to be the last battle of the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century. That it became both of these things can be attributed to the controversy which began almost immediately after, or perhaps even during, the engagement. On the twelfth, Rupert wrote to Charles II to claim that his failure to obtain a decisive victory was due chiefly to the failure of the French squadron, which, he stated, had stood to windward of the main battle, engaged with only a few Dutch vessels . This account was carried to London by Captain Charles Haward, who had been wounded in the engagement, and the first reports of the battle reached the court in the late evening of 15 August .2 Howard’s ‘whispers’ quickly became the accepted orthodoxy concerning the battle of the Texel; one of the ‘whispers’ had Howard, on Rupert’s quarterdeck, asking the prince, ‘”Does your Highnesse see the French yonder?” and that the Prince replyed in a great passion, “Yes God zounds, doe I”‘.3 The hurried postscripts to the letters which his correspondents sent late on the fifteenth to Sir Joseph Williamson, then attending the Congress of Cologne, told him that ‘the French did not behave them[selves] well, as haveing the wind and yet not bearing upon the enemy but keeping at a distance, though the signall was given them to beare upon them’, and cast other aspersions on the conduct of the French squadron.4

These early rumours were quickly supported by other evidence from the fleet, as damaged ships returned to the Thames and injured officers and seamen returned to land. The reaction in the coffee-houses and social gatherings of the capital was predictable. By the seventeenth, ‘the dinn [was] soe great against the French squadron for not bearing in when they had the full advantage of the wind, and might have destroyed all, that the Prince will never forgive them…This is like to breed ill blood…the whole Towne has been strangely enraged against the French’.5 Official narratives of the battle were hurried out on that day, but these only appeared under the (justified) suspicion that they had been doctored to appear more favourable to the French.6 Further letters from Rupert only reaffirmed his initial criticisms of his allies: on the twenty-third, for instance, he informed Arlington that
I find that Monsr d’Estrées [the French admiral] intends to make great excuses for not bearing into the enemy, not understanding the signs and many other fine things…I will satisfy His Majesty and the whole world that his squadron was to windward of the enemy, drawn up in very good order, and never bore within cannon-shot of the enemy, leaving their whole fleet upon me and some few of my
squadron.7
By the end of August, the popular clamour against the French was already at fever-pitch – ‘every seaman’s wife haveing an account from her husband of their haveing been betrayed, as they call it, by the French’8 – when two developments served only to exacerbate the frenzy. Firstly, Rupert himself came to London from the fleet on the twenty-seventh ‘and complaines much of the behaviour of the French in the late engagement…they did not, he thinkes, absolutely run away, but twas so like it, that he knows not how else to call it’.9 Rupert followed up his verbal complaints by publishing his own narrative of the battle at the beginning of September, in which he claimed that ‘if the French…had…borne down against the enemy…I must have routed and torn them all to pieces’.10 Secondly, the English attempt to scapegoat their allies, which a few more dispassionate commentators had suggested might have originated in ‘the little inclination the English generally have for the French’11, suddenly received what seemed to be conclusive support from an unexpected quarter. Before the end of August, a relation by the vice-admiral of the French squadron, the marquis de Martel, was circulating in London. This supported Rupert’s position by claiming that Martel had attempted to engage as actively as he could, but that he had not been seconded by d’Estrées and the rest of the squadron, whose inactivity he described as ‘shamefull’.12

These new revelations gave fresh impetus to the popular disgust against the French squadron, especially when it was learned that Martel’s punishment for producing his version of events was to be a spell in the Bastille. One of Williamson’s correspondents claimed that ‘every apple-woman makes it a proverbe, Will you fight like the French?’; William Temple informed the earl of Essex that ‘all the talk breaks out so openly about the French squadron acquitting themselves so ill in the last fight, that there is no surpressing it’; while Sir Ralph Verney’s correspondent William Denton informed him that ‘ye Monsrs plaid the Pultroons’.13 The barrage of criticism was sustained throughout September, with an increasing awareness of the impact it was likely to have on the imminent meeting of parliament. ‘Every one dreads the meeting of this Parliament’, Henry Ball had written to Williamson on 29 August, ‘and feare our enmity to the French may breed ill blood among them, for all people will have it that wee must breake off our league with them, or suffer our selves to be ruined, but I dare not write halfe of what is spoken in publique in every coffee-house’.14 Graphic accounts of the popular hostility to the French fleet and the French alliance continued to fill letters from London until well into October, when Ball wrote ‘the hate and malice against the French continues as high as ever…the French treachery dayly appeares more palpable’.15 Charles II’s dangerous disregard of such sentiments is epitomised by his decision in November 1673 to grant three large diamonds worth £2,200 to d’Estrées and individual jewels worth between £400 and £600 to three other French officers including, astonishingly, even the disgraced Martel.

In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the session of parliament which began on 27 October should have taken up the clamour against the French. Sir John Monson, MP for Lincoln, remarked that ‘the last fight was, as if the English and Dutch had been the gladiators for the French spectators’, while the former secretary to the Lord Admiral, Sir William Coventry, damned the entire French performance and the subsequent treatment of the marquis de Martel:
Has heard of two captains killed in the French fleet, and one died of an unfortunate disease (the pox)…one unfortunate gentleman did fight, and because that gentleman said…”that the French did not their duty”, he is clapped up into the Bastille…Martel has fought too much, or said too much, which is his misfortune.16
At much the same time the French ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, and other observers, were commenting on the impact of the reports of the battle, and the ways in which they were making it difficult to hold the alliance together17. References to the battle of the Texel were still being made in the Commons as late as January 1674, when one of the articles of impeachment against the earl of Arlington blamed him for bringing in the French fleet and all the consequences which followed18, but by then the French alliance was in its death throes, and it was finally buried by the treaty of Westminster in the following month, when England unilaterally withdrew from the Franco-Dutch war. Even so, the memory of the battle remained alive. In his devastating satire of 1676, The History of Insipids, Rochester made reference to it:
But Charles what could thy policy be,
to run so many sad disasters,
To join thy fleet with false D’Estrees,
To make the French of Holland masters?19
In later years, the assumption that the French had failed to support the English at the Texel and were therefore chiefly responsible for the failure to obtain a victory was central to all accounts of the battle in standard naval histories. Indeed, it was often given the dimension of a ‘conspiracy theory’ by reviving a charge which was first made in the autumn of 1673, namely that the French squadron had been acting under secret orders from Louis XIV – orders which prohibited any wholehearted action against the Dutch.20 David Hannay condemned ‘the entire worthlessness of the French as allies’, and this condescending, xenophobic attitude was common in British naval histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.21 More recently, Stephen Baxter and Carl Ekberg in particular have regarded the battle of the Texel as being one of the most significant factors in both the collapse of the Anglo-French alliance and the survival of the Dutch state itself, with Baxter calling it ‘the turning point of the war’.22 Both Ronald Hutton and John Miller have set the battle in the context of the complex domestic and international realpolitik which existed in the second half of 1673 and the early months of 1674, while Stephen Pincus has seen it as a critical stage in the shift of English popular attitudes towards an anti-French stance23. Indeed, there is little doubt that the popular reaction to the perceived French perfidy at the Texel was a genuine and significant political force during that period, with virtually everyone from the proverbial apple-woman upwards (with the obvious exception of Charles II himself) seeming to be united in their condemnation of the French. Rather more debatable is the question of whether that popular reaction was actually justified: was the outcome of the battle of the Texel truly decided because, in the words of Captain John Dawson of the Advice, part of the Blue squadron in the engagement, ‘[the French] lay like so many Newters more then an Enemy to the Dutch’?24

The invasion project

Paradoxically, the battle of the Texel was the product of a strategy which had already been abandoned in most of its essentials when the battle was fought. From 1672 onwards, Charles II and his ministers had been developing a plan for an invasion of the Dutch province of Zeeland as part of a longer-term strategy aimed at obtaining some or all of that province in any peace settlement. The idea seems to have originated with George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, who allegedly proposed the conquest of Zeeland to Oliver Cromwell as a way of becoming ‘master not only of the Dutch to all perpetuity but [also] sole arbitrator of the sea’. He apparently reiterated the proposal to Charles II in the winter of 1665-6, and at much the same time a paper was produced (probably unofficially) advocating a direct attack on Vlissingen, which was said to be weakly defended and likely to fall easily to an expeditionary force of only fifteen ships and 2,000 men.[24A] These schemes were mooted at a time when the Netherlands was being invaded from the east by Charles’s ally the Bishop of Munster. The bishop’s army had advanced into the eastern provinces of the Netherlands in 1665 and initially experienced spectacular success. Although he was ultimately pushed back and made peace with the Dutch in 1666, his attack suggested both that the eastern borders of the Netherlands were vulnerable, and that a ‘pincer movement’, culminating in an invasion of Zeeland, might be feasible if the Dutch drew forces away from that province to deal with a similar (or, better, a significantly greater) assault from the east. Therefore, the invasion project must have seemed a much more realistic possibility in 1672-3, when the main invasion was being undertaken by the rather more formidable armies of Louis XIV . At the very least, Charles hoped to regain the ‘cautionary towns’, Den Brielle, Vlissingen and the Rammekens fort, which had been held by England from 1585 until his grandfather James I had returned them to the Dutch in 1616. Indeed, there seemed to be some grounds for believing that Zeeland might choose voluntarily to place itself under English rule (if only as the lesser of two evils, if the alternative was succumbing to the tender mercies of Louis XIV), and Charles magnanimously planned to offer the Zeelanders the golden opportunity to send MPs to Westminster and pay taxes to his exchequer.25

After a succession of false starts and disputes over the command, a ramshackle army of some 8-10,000 men was assembled at Blackheath in the spring and early summer of 1673, and an amphibious flotilla of sorts was assembled in the Thames – 20 transports, 5 storeships, 5 so-called ‘horseships’, 1 coal ship, 1 ship carrying hay, 9 so-called ‘vessels for landing’ and 8 barges.26 Pepys undertook a detailed breakdown of the cost of transporting 10,000 troops and one hundred horse to the Netherlands and maintaining them there for two months (the estimated total came to £48,827).27 The actual strategic plan was vague, and had been altered several times since 1672. There had been schemes for landing in Zeeland itself, at Goeree or elsewhere, but by May 1673 the favoured option was a landing near Scheveningen, which, it was hoped, would allow the invasion force to effect a conjunction with the prince of Condé’s army, advancing from Utrecht.28 Meanwhile, the combined Anglo-French fleet sought in vain to achieve the triumph over de Ruyter’s numerically inferior force which had eluded it in the previous year. Two battles off the main Dutch anchorage, the Schooneveld, in May and June, failed to give the allies anything like the advantage which they craved, and the fleet retired to the Thames to await a decision on its next move.

Between 6 and 16 July, Charles II, the duke of York and Rupert presided over a series of three important councils of war. Rupert’s view, that without defeating the Dutch fleet it would be little short of folly to make a serious attempt at landing in Zeeland, won the day; it was decided that, after an appearance off the Schooneveld to alert the Dutch to his presence, Rupert should cruise off the Texel in the hope that de Ruyter would be drawn out to defend against the expected landing and to escort home the valuable incoming fleet of the Dutch East Indies Company, the VOC. Although an actual landing at the Texel was approved at the council on 6 July, the final meeting on the sixteenth only approved the diversion of the invasion flotilla to Yarmouth, where the army was to be landed to await the outcome of the anticipated victorious battle at sea.29 This, therefore, was the rather nebulous strategic ‘plan’ which the combined fleet possessed when it sailed out of the Thames on 17 July, accompanied by the army from Blackheath on board its flotilla in the rear of the fleet. ‘A more formidable fleete has at noe time sayled out of England’, Sir Robert Southwell reported to the earl of Essex; ‘such a fleet as I never yet saw’, wrote Sir Edward Spragge, admiral of the blue.30 After seeing the invasion flotilla safe into Yarmouth, the main fleet sailed for the Dutch coast. It consisted of approximately ninety major warships, the French under the comte d’Estrées forming the white squadron and Prince Rupert and Sir Edward Spragge commanding the red and blue squadrons respectively.

Unfortunately, the optimism of both Southwell and Spragge was distinctly misplaced. Even before the July councils of war, the actual role of both the fleet and the army had been called into serious question. Several commentators, notably the French and Venetian ambassadors, realised that Charles and his ministers needed a successful landing for their own domestic political agenda; there were hopes that foreign conquests would reconcile a hostile public and parliament to an unpopular war.31 However, the actual reaction to the proposed invasion, from some quarters at least, had been to condemn ‘the design to hold strong places overseas, which commit the country, involve great expense, yield no profit and scant honour and are incapable of bridling the Dutch, as is boastfully pretended’.32 Moreover, the invasion scheme was very much a purely English brainchild in what was supposed to be a jointly-run war, but which in reality was an overwhelmingly French effort. Louis and at least some of his ministers were opposed to the scheme, partly because the English demands for territory in Zeeland were threatening to sabotage the progress of the peace talks at the congress of Cologne (the Swedish mediator there, Count Tott, was particularly hostile to the notion of England being established as a power on both sides of the North Sea).33 In addition, Charles and his ministers had deliberately kept their invasion plans as secret as possible from their French allies, so that Colbert de Croissy, Louis’ ambassador in London, had little idea of what the English were actually up to.34 Faced with so many different pressures, English policy fluctuated confusingly, but by the last weeks of July, with the combined fleet already at sea and the army encamped at Yarmouth ready to descend on the Dutch coast once it was called for, Charles finally abandoned his demands for Dutch towns and inclined towards a more moderate peace settlement.35 The rationale underpinning Rupert’s cruise had effectively disappeared, and on 3 August Charles wrote to the prince to inform him that he now considered the invasion scheme ‘less advisable than it was at first’, and that, because of the progress of the Cologne negotiations, he should seek only to keep the sea – the assumption being that de Ruyter was unlikely to emerge from behind his sheltering sandbanks.36

The rather pathetic demise of the Zeeland invasion project led to some caustic comment, even in a parliament where many had suspected the ‘potential for absolutism’ inherent in the king’s new army – as Henry Powle commented a few months later, ‘the army has done nothing but the famous expedition from Blackheath to Yarmouth’, and Sir Thomas Meres quipped that ‘some said it was to land to beate the Dutch, but it turned off, it seems, to take Harwich’.37 Both contemporaries and historians took the view that it was just as well the army had not got beyond Yarmouth: the camp at Blackheath had been a shambles, with raw, drunken recruits marshalled unsuccessfully by raw, drunken officers under a widely detested foreign general, Count Schomberg.38 Indeed, a landing in Zeeland might well have been disastrous. The Dutch had major garrisons to the south of the province, and the main Dutch field army was drawn up only about forty miles to the east, between Geertruidenberg and Huisden, with William of Orange’s headquarters situated at Raamsdonk. Although Condé proclaimed his readiness to assist an English landing as well as he could, his ability to do so would have been limited by the fact that much of the land between his army and the coast was under water.39 On the other hand, the Dutch defences were not necessarily as formidable as Charles claimed they were in his letter to Rupert, nor as some recent historians have assumed they were. The appearance of the prince’s fleet off the Dutch coast on 24 July caused panic from Den Brielle to The Hague; the coastal towns themselves were poorly fortified, largely because William had decided to entrust his coastal defence almost exclusively to de Ruyter’s fleet in order to maximise the size of his field army, which was itself largely raw and untried. Three regiments were hastily despatched from Geertruidenberg to Scheveningen, but otherwise, the only real force which could have immediately confronted an English invasion would have been a ‘home guard’ drawn from the burghers of The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Dort and Rotterdam.40 Even Schomberg’s shambolic army might have stood a realistic chance of defeating such a force. Moreover, the hastily-conceived last-minute switch to the strategy of attempting a landing at the Texel and/or Den Helder might have caused the Dutch even greater problems. Although it would have been more difficult to support such a landing force from England, it would have taken far longer for William to deploy regular units against it (and it might have been easier for Condé to threaten any such move north by the Dutch), and even a short-lived presence at the entrance to the Zuiderzee would certainly have created real problems for Dutch commerce, especially for the returning VOC fleet which traditionally trans-shipped its cargoes into barges at the Texel to allow it to make a more lightly-laden transit of the Pampus shoals leading to the river Ij at Amsterdam. Above all, even as brief and disastrous an invasion as any carried out by Schomberg’s army threatened to be might well have forced William at least to postpone his switch to the offensive in September 1673, when he captured Naarden and subsequently pressurised Louis in the Rhineland by taking Bonn.41 In the light of these considerations, it is at least possible that Charles II abandoned his invasion project too early and too easily.

[to be continued]

Notes

1. Rupert to Charles, 12 August 1673: PRO SP 29/336/242 (accurate summary in CSPD 1673, 490)

2. Ibid; W Bridgeman to Williamson, 15 Aug 1673, & H Ball to same, 18 Aug 1673: Letters to Williamson, I, 162, 170; Alberti to Doge and Senate, 15/25 August 1673: CSPVen 1673-5, 98; Lady Dorothy Long to Sir Justinian Isham, 16 August 1673: Northamptonshire Record Office (hereafter NRO), Isham MS 787.

3. R Yard to Williamson, 16 August 1673: Letters to Williamson I, 174.

4. Bridgeman and Yard to Williamson, 15 August 1673: Letters to Williamson, I, 161-2, 168.

5. Sir R Southwell & Ball to Williamson, 17-18 August 1673; ibid., I, 168-70. Cf Captain Seth Thurston to Navy Board, 24 Aug 1673: PRO ADM 106/284/339.

6. CSPD 1673, 498; Yard to Williamson, 18 August 1673: Letters to Williamson, I, 173-4; narratives printed in Journals and Narratives, 390-4.

7. Rupert to Arlington, 23 August 1673: PRO SP 29/336/286 (accurate summary in CSPD 1673, 509). Cf same to same, 14 Aug.; to Charles II, 17 & 24 Aug.: CSPD 1673, 494, 498, 510.

8. Yard to Williamson, 25 August 1673: Letters to Williamson, I, 186.

9. Ball & Bridgeman to Williamson, 29 August 1673: ibid., 189-92.

10. Most accessible copies of Rupert’s narrative: CSPD 1673, 520-2; Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 306-9. Dating of narrative: Yard to Williamson, 5 Sept 1673: Letters to Williamson, II, 9.

11. Bridgeman to Williamson, 15 Aug 1673: ibid., I, 162.

12. Martel’s narrative: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 321-5. Dating of narrative: Bridgeman to Williamson, 29 Aug 1673, & Ball to same, 1 Sept 1673: Letters to Williamson, I, 189-90, II, 1. His arrest: ibid., II, 20; Seignelay to Colbert de Croissy, 7/17 Sept 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 348.

13. Quotations: Letters to Williamson, II, 2; Temple to Essex, 30 Aug 1673: BL Stowe MS 202, fo 337; Denton to Verney, 4 Sept 1673: BL M636/26. Cf Lady Dorothy Long to Sir Justinian Isham, 23 Aug 1673: NRO, Isham MS 788.

14. Ball to Williamson, 29 Aug 1673: Letters to Williamson, I, 194. Cf ibid., I, 185, 194-5; II, 13, 16.

15. Ball to Williamson, 10 & 17 Oct 1673: ibid., II, 36, 46.

16. Grey, Debates, II, 198-9, 212. Cf Garraway’s speech, 31 Oct 1673: ibid., II, 205.

17. Letters of Colbert de Croissy to Colbert & Seignelay: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 332ff.

18. Grey, Debates, II, 346-7; CJ, IX, 294.

19. Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. V de Sola Pinto (1953), 111.

20. For examples of contemporary or near-contemporary expositions of the ‘conspiracy theory’ see Grey, Debates, II, 212; Christianissimus Christianus (1678), 39-40. A judicious modern assessment is provided by C J Ekberg, The Failure of Louis XIV’s Dutch War (Chapel Hill, 1979), 163, although he does cite a document which supposedly provides some evidence in support of the theory – AN, serie marine B5, fo 198ff.

21. D Hannay, A Short History of the Royal Navy (1897), 436. Cf J Campbell, The Naval History of Great Britain (1818), II, 213; W L Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History (1898), II, 317-22.

22. S Baxter, William III (1966), 104; Ekberg, Failure, 154.

23. R Hutton, Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford 1989), 302-19; J Miller, Charles II (1991), 205-19; S Pincus, ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 333-61 (especially pp 356-7).

24. Dawson to Navy Board, 18 Aug 1673: PRO ADM 1/3545, p 197.

24A. BL Additional MS 34,729, fos. 251-2, ‘Proposition pour le surprise de la ville de Vlyssynge’. From internal evidence, it seems likely that this paper had originally been drawn up in the previous war, probably over the winter of 1665-6.

25. Minutes of committee of foreign affairs, 1672-3: PRO, SP 104/177, fos 60, 62-5, 68, 79, 152-3, 162; original instructions to Rupert, 26 Apr 1673: NMM AGC/C/2; Ralph Verney to Edmund Verney, 15 & 19 May 1673: BL M636/26; Baxter, William III, 88, 90.

26. Composition of amphibious flotilla: PRO, ADM 106/284/98. Cf ADM 1/3545 & 106/26, passim; BL Egerton MS 862. Army at Blackheath: Hutton, Charles II, 303-4; Miller, Charles II, 207-9.

27. Bod, Rawl MS A191, fo 211.

28. Earlier schemes: see minutes of foreign affairs committee cited in note 25. 1673 scheme: Charles to Rupert, 24 May 1673: BL Lansdowne MS 1236, fo 156; Aungier to Essex, 13 May 1673: BL Stowe MS 202, fo 40; Colbert de Croissy to Louis XIV, 21/31 July 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 289-92.

29. Ibid., 288, 292-3; Journals and Narratives, 42, 324-6.

30. Southwell to Essex, 18 July 1673: BL Stowe MS 202, fo. 205; Spragge’s journal, 17 July 1673, Journals and Narratives, 326.

31. Colbert de Croissy to Louis XIV, 21/31 July 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 289-92; Alberti to Doge and Senate, 16/26 May 1673: CSPVen 1673-5, 52.

32. Same to same, 11/21 July 1673: ibid., 75.

33. Baxter, William III, 104; Ekberg, Failure, 85-90.

34. Minutes of foreign affairs committee, 13 Mar 1673: PRO SP 104/177, fo 151v; Colbert de Croissy to Louis XIV, 21/31 July 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 290. Cf CSPVen 1673-5, 83, 85.

35. Ekberg, Failure, 92; Hutton, Charles II, 305-6; Miller, Charles II, 205-7.

36. Charles to Rupert, 3 August 1673, printed in Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 297-8; James to Rupert, 3 August 1673: BL Lansdowne MS 1236, fo 162. Cf Charles to Rupert, 8 August 1673: ibid., fo 219.

37. Speeches of 31 Oct and 3 Nov 1673 respectively: Grey, Debates, II, 208, 215. The reference to Harwich presumably refers to the diversion there of those vessels which could not get into Yarmouth: PRO, ADM 2/1736, fo 40v, order to Schomberg, 25 July 1673.

38. Hutton, Charles II, 304; Miller, Charles II, 208-9.

39. Conde to de Cheuilnes, 30 July / 8 Aug 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 295; F J G Ten Raa, Het staatsche leger 1568-1795, VI (Den Haag 1940), 11-13, 19.

40. Dutch coastal defences: newsletters from Rotterdam, 25 July / 3 Aug, & from Amsterdam, 29 July / 7 August 1673: Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 293, 294-5; newsletters and reports in PRO SP 101/57 (inconsistent foliation). William’s strategy: Ten Raa, Leger, VI, 13, 15-16. Quality of Dutch field army: Baxter, William III, 95 (a corrective to Dr Hutton’s exaggerated opinion of the qualities of William’s troops: Charles II, 304). Cf J. R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (1996), 201-3.

41. Baxter, William III, 105-7.

Anglo-Dutch wars

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