J D Davies - Historian and Author

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Anglo-Dutch wars

Endless Poetry

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‘…this damned war: the mud, the noise, the endless poetry.’ 

(Lord Flashheart, Blackadder Goes Forth)

There are very, very few similarities between the First World War and the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-7). One of them, arguably, is that both wars generated a substantial amount of memorable poetry, albeit of very different kinds. Having known and loved the literature of the Restoration period from my youth – I studied Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel for A-level, not something that I suspect many British sixth formers encounter these days! – I was keen to reference it in the Quinton series, and The Blast That Tears The Skies, the first of the four books that will be set against the backdrop of the second war, provided an ideal opportunity to do so. Thus each chapter begins, not with my words, but with an epigraph consisting of a verse or two from some of the ‘war poetry’ of the age (or, in some cases, with verses from other poetry of the time, and even from popular songs).

The epigraph at the very beginning of the book is taken from Edmund Waller’s Instructions to a Painter:

First draw the sea, that portion which between

The greater world and this of ours is seen;

Here place the British, there the Holland fleet,

Vast floating armies, both prepar’d to meet!

Draw the world expecting who shall reign,

After this combat, o’er the conquer’d Main.

Waller’s biographer says of this work that it ‘turns the inconclusive battle of Lowestoft into a second Actium and the duke of York into a peerless hero of romance’; a few years later, the Earl of Rochester said of Waller that

He best can turne, enforce, and soften things,

To praise great Conqu’rours, or to flatter Kings.
Not surprisingly, Waller’s gushing hyperbole drew forth critics. 1666 brought forth Second and Third Advices to a Painter, followed in September 1667 by the Last Instructions to a Painter. The latter was certainly by the brilliant poet and satirist Andrew Marvell, the former two probably so, and I have attributed them to Marvell in the various epigraphs taken from the Second Advice. Marvell certainly pulled no punches. Here, for example, is his description of Sir William Coventry, secretary to the Lord High Admiral and a character in The Blast That Tears The Skies; Coventry was widely accused of corruption, notably the sale of naval offices.
Then, Painter, draw cerulean Coventry,

Keeper, or rather chanc’llor, of the sea;

Of whom the captain buys his leave to die,

And barters or for wounds or infamy…

Marvell had been to sea, albeit principally as a passenger, and his role as MP for Hull meant that he was well versed in maritime affairs. This is reflected in a passage which shows a clear grasp of the nature and horrors of naval warfare at the time:
They stab their ships with one another’s guns,

They fight so near it seems to be on ground,

And ev’n the bullets meeting bullets wound.

The Noise, the Smoke, the Sweat, the Fire, the Blood

Is not to be expressed nor understood.

The war also brought forth many lesser poets and song-writers. Most of these were unashamedly patriotic, and penned verses of varying degrees of awfulness. Here, for example, is an offering from the author of England’s Valour, and Holland’s Terrour (1665):
Our ships are bravely rigged, and manned with seamen stout,

Our soldiers good will spend their blood to bang their foes about:

They long to be a dealing blows, delay doth vex them sore,

With delight, they will fight, when the cannons loud do roar.

My personal favourite from this sub-genre is John Bradshaw, rector of the tiny village of Cublington, Buckinghamshire, many miles from the sea, who in 1665 was moved to write Some Thoughts Upon the Dutch Navies Demurr and upon the First Squadron of the Kings Royall Navy. This consisted principally of a succession of dreadful puns and couplets derived from the names of the ships in the Red Squadron of the Duke of York’s fleet. He excelled himself with his reference to the Royal Oak, named after the tree in the grounds of Boscobel House, Shropshire, where Charles II hid while fleeing from the Battle of Worcester in 1651:

I see not what your force can do to Penn

In th’ Royal Charles with all your ships and men.

Know that the sturdy famous Royal Oak

Fears not your artificial thunder stroke.

But if she should miscarry, we could fell

(If it were lawful) more at Boscobel.

Boscobel - the house and the 'offspring' of the original Royal Oak

The Second Anglo-Dutch War also saw some verse from men on the front line. But this certainly isn’t the savage war poetry produced by the men in the trenches. For example, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, later the sixth Earl of Dorset, was one of the great court wits of the age (not to mention having become a murderer at the age of nineteen, escaping only thanks to the king’s indulgent pardon). Like many young Cavaliers, he volunteered for service in the fleet in 1664-5, hoping to see some action against the Dutch in order to gain a military reputation. As it was, though, the only service of any sort that Buckhurst seems to have performed was to pen ‘To All You Ladies Now on Land’, which became wildly popular at Charles II’s court:

To all you ladies now at land,

We men at sea indite;

But first would have you understand,

How hard it is to write;

The Muses now, and Neptune too,

We must implore to write to you.

                        With a fa, la, la, la, la.

Elsewhere in The Blast That Tears The Skies, I’ve chosen chapter epigraphs that more generally reflect the mood of the time and the chapter itself. Here, for example, is a verse from a popular song of the early 1660s, which neatly encapsulates the age-old lament that things used to be so much better in the ‘good old days’:
New fashions in houses, new fashions at table,

Old servants discharged and the new not so able,

And all good custom is now but a fable,

And is not old England grown new?

While working one day on a manuscript volume from the 1660s in the Medieval glories of Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian, Oxford, I came across a neat little poem from the decade which perfectly encapsulates the cynicism of the age and thus provided the ideal epigraph for one of the land-based chapters of The Blast That Tears The Skies:

Good people draw near,

If a ballad you’ll hear,

Which will teach you the right way of thriving.

Ne’er trouble your heads

With your books or your beads

Now the world’s rul’d by cheating and swiving.

In something of a belated nod to my A-level English lessons, I also called on a couple of quotations from Absalom and Achitophel, notably his famous description of Charles II, with its brilliant double entendre about the king’s ‘extended wand’:

Auspicious prince! at whose nativity

Some royal planet rul’d the southern sky;

Thy longing countries’ darling and desire,

Their cloudy pillar, and their guardian fire,

Their second Moses, whose extended wand

Divides the seas and shows the promis’d land…

The literature of the age provides a wonderful resource for any student of the times. I’ll certainly be providing epigraphs from  the poems, songs and plays of the Restoration era in the fifth Quinton novel, The Battle of All The Ages, which I’m currently writing; set against the backdrop of the Four Days Battle of 1666, the year in question provides not only more acid satire from the Advices to a Painter but also John Dryden’s epic Annus Mirabilis. The poetic epigraphs are also likely to feature in the sixth book, and they’ll certainly appear in the seventh, which will centre on the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667 – a disaster that inspired Marvell to write probably his most devastating verse of all.

 

“It’s coming home, it’s coming home…”

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Last week I was speaking to Dutch TV about a documentary they’re planning on the Anglo-Dutch wars, and during the course of that it emerged that the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, captured at Chatham in 1667 and a prominent exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, will be returning temporarily to the UK for an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. This is fantastic news; I’ve seen the sternpiece in Amsterdam several times (here are a couple my pictures of it, taken in the days when I didn’t have a particularly decent camera!), but to have it back home, even if only briefly, will be quite something. The Royal Charles, launched at Woolwich in 1655 as the Naseby, was the ship which brought Charles II back to England at the Restoration in 1660 and served as flagship during the great engagements of the second Anglo-Dutch war. But in 1667 she suffered an ignominious fate during what some regard as the worst British military humiliation of all time. To quote from my forthcoming essay in volume 8 of the Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society:

At about 10 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday 12 June 1667, a squadron of Dutch warships sailed up Gillingham Reach on the River Medway. Ahead of them lay a large chain, stretched taut across the river, blocking their way to the British warships that lay beyond, off the great naval dockyard at Chatham. Most of the British ships were dismasted and virtually unarmed. Lacking the money to send a proper fleet to sea for that summer’s campaign (and believing in any case that peace was imminent), King Charles II had ordered the ships to be laid up, trusting that the chain and the forts guarding the Medway would be sufficient to protect the navy against just such a Dutch attack. But most of the forts were still incomplete, and the largest and most important of them, that at Sheerness, had already fallen to the Dutch two days earlier. Still, the great chain appeared to be an insuperable obstacle, and so it might have proved but for the audacity of Jan Van Brakel, a Rotterdam captain, who volunteered to lead his ship, the Vrede, in an attack on the barrier. Under heavy fire, he attacked the guardship Unity, which protected the chain, and thanks to a supine defence by her inadequate crew, he took her without a serious fight. This allowed the fireship Pro Patria to sail directly at the chain, which broke on impact (according to the Dutch) or else sank under its own weight (according to the English). Beyond one last and easily negotiated barrier of undermanned guardships lay the most seaward of Charles II’s great ships, the Royal Charles. Only 32 of her 82 guns were still aboard, and she had virtually no crew embarked. The men ordered in haste to tow her to safety up river simply turned and fled when they saw that they were too few, and too weakly armed, to resist the approaching Dutch. A small prize crew quickly took possession of the ship, striking her British colours and replacing them with the tricolour of the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

The Royal Charles was taken back to the Netherlands and laid up at Hellevoitsluis; she had too great a draught to serve in the Dutch navy. In 1673 an operation to rescue her seems to have been contemplated, with the Earl of Ossory appointed to command it, but Charles II allegedly countermanded the order the night before Ossory was due to set out. In any case the Dutch had no further use for their prize and she was broken up that year, only the sternpiece being retained.

The fact that the sternpiece has been treated so reverently in the Netherlands is one of the best proofs of the very different treatments of the Anglo-Dutch wars in Britain and the Netherlands; this turned out to the principal theme of my phone conversation with Suzanne from Dutch TV. It is not difficult to see why. The Dutch effectively won the wars, certainly the second and third if not the first, and their victories are a key part of the mythology of their ‘golden age’, which lasted from roughly until 1580 to 1690. Thus ‘the Battle of Chatham’, as they term it, is their equivalent of Trafalgar, De Ruyter their equivalent of Nelson. As I wrote in my book Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89:

In Britain…the Dutch wars are usually regarded as an embarrassing epoch of naval mediocrity, sandwiched between the more memorable (and successful) eras of Drake and Nelson. The names of the Dutch navy’s largest warships are and always have been redolent of the seventeenth century:  De Ruyter, Tromp, De Zeven Provincien. Conversely, the Royal Navy has had no warship named after a battle of the age since the destroyer Solebay was broken up in 1967, none after a seaman since the frigate Russell went to the scrapyard in 1985. There has not even been a HMS Blake since the cruiser of that name was scrapped in 1982, and there has never been a HMS Pepys. The ever diminishing size of the fleet, and rampant ‘political correctness’ in the naming of British warships, means that such illustrious names are unlikely ever to go to sea again under the white ensign. Moreover, the largest surviving relic of a British warship captured by the Dutch, the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, is a prized exhibit at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. What has often been suggested as the largest surviving relic of a Dutch warship captured by the British, supposedly the figurehead of the 50-gun Stavoren, captured in 1672, adorns the side wall of a pub in Suffolk. 

(The pub is the Red Lion at Martlesham. In fact, the figurehead is of early eighteenth century date, though as the pub has existed since Tudor times, it is possible that the current figurehead, below left, replaced that of the Stavoren. There is clearly an English tradition of placing naval relics in pubs: another figurehead, allegedly from the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, stands outside the Star Inn at Alfriston, Sussex, below right.) 

This question of how different nations always see the past through prisms, exaggerating their triumphs and diminishing their defeats – just as individual human beings do – was thrown into focus recently by the wonderful story that France has plans for a ‘Napoleonland’ theme park. (See M M Bennetts’ hilarious take on it all – blog post of 7 February.) Amidst all the inevitable scoffing from we rosbifs, though, there might be some food for thought. At least Napoleonland will have the good grace to give a prominent profile to both Trafalgar and Waterloo, and the French do have some ‘form’ in being prepared to own up to their own reverses. (Of course, cynics might say that they have plenty to own up to.) It is difficult to imagine an English ‘Hundred Years War’ theme park giving similar prominence to the Battle of Castillon, 1453, a defeat as decisively terminal in that war as Waterloo was for Napoleon. But the French have even created a small museum at Agincourt, or Azincourt to give it its proper name, manned – when I was there last – by a justifiably grumpy and somewhat embarrassed middle-aged Frenchwoman; French magnanimity only went so far, though, as she spoke virtually no English despite the fact that almost all of her visitors had ‘GB’ plates on their cars.
So let’s magnanimously welcome back the Royal Charles sternpiece, at once an embarrassing reminder of a catastrophic British defeat and the finest surviving relic of the Anglo-Dutch wars. I, for one, am delighted that its presence here ought to give a welcome boost to the public profile of the Anglo-Dutch wars, hopefully leading to enhanced public awareness and understanding as a result.