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Battle of Lowestoft

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.’

Captain, later Admiral Sir, John Harman
Captain, later Admiral Sir, John 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.’

Filed Under: Naval historical fiction, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Anglo-Dutch wars, Battle of Lowestoft, Henry Brouncker, King James II, sir william penn

Endless Poetry

18/02/2013 by J D Davies

‘…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.

 

Filed Under: Historical sources, Naval historical fiction, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Advices to a Painter, Andrew Marvell, Anglo-Dutch wars, Battle of Lowestoft, Edmund Waller, The Blast That Tears The Skies

1665: The Second Blast

02/04/2012 by J D Davies

In the summer of 1665, while plague was beginning to spread in London, one of the greatest battles of the sailing era took place. The Battle of Lowestoft ‘was one of the most blue-blooded battles of the age of sail. The British fleet was commanded in person by James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral, heir to the throne, and the first prince to command a fleet in battle since the days of the Plantaganets’ (as I put it in Pepys’s Navy). Prince Rupert of the Rhine commanded the White Squadron of the British fleet, while a horde of aristocrats swarmed to sea as volunteers: they included Charles II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, the king’s favourite the Earl of Falmouth, and a number of the most famous Restoration rakes, such as the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Buckhurst. Meanwhile the Dutch were hamstrung by factional jealousies between their seven provinces and five admiralties. As a result their fleet had no fewer than twenty-one flag officers, the British only nine (in the pattern established in 1653 of admirals, vice-admirals and rear-admirals of the Red, White and Blue squadrons). The bitter rivalries in the Dutch fleet ultimately caused chaos during the battle itself, contributing to one of the worst defeats of the Netherlands’ ‘golden age’.

On paper, though, the two fleets were relatively equal. The Dutch had 107 ships, 92 of which carried thirty guns or more, and the fleet as a whole mounted 4,864 guns and was manned by 21,500 men. The British had 88 ships mounting thirty guns or more in a fleet carrying a total of about 4,800 guns and some 24,000 men. But these bare figures concealed a huge disparity in weight of shot: the British had twenty-seven ships capable of firing over 1,000 pounds of shot, the Dutch just one. (Pepys’s Navy)

What follows is a precis of my account of the battle in Pepys’s Navy:

The two fleets sighted each other on 1 June, but on that and the next day, Obdam (the general appointed to command the Dutch fleet) refused to attack, despite the apparent advantage that the easterly wind gave him…By the morning of the third, though, the wind had come round more to the south-south-west, favouring the British, and at 2 a.m. the fleets were about five miles apart. From dawn (about 4 a.m.) onwards, both sides manoeuvred to gain the weather gage, a contest that was won by Vice-Admiral Christopher Myngs, flying his flag in the Triumph, and the van division of the Red. The two fleets then passed each other on opposite tacks, too far apart to do any real damage to each other…Once the two lines had passed each other, at about 5.30, the Dutch began to tack, and York intended his fleet to tack from the rear, according to his new fighting instruction; but it took so long for his flagship to hoist the correct signal that Rupert, commanding the van or White squadron, used his initiative and tacked first. This seemingly confused Sir John Lawson, leading the van of the Red in the Royal Oak, who did not tack in his turn, thereby opening up a gap between the White, now heading north-west, and the Red, still heading south-east. To remedy the situation, Penn took the flagship Royal Charles out of the line, followed by the Earl of Sandwich’s Blue squadron. The manoeuvre was made smartly enough to prevent the Dutch breaking through the fleet as it tacked, although Sandwich almost became entangled in a mass of confused ships. The two squadrons then formed a second line to windward, the Red covering Rupert and the White while the Blue fell in behind the latter. Obdam attempted to break through to gain the weather gage at about 7.00, but was deterred by the presence of the Red, and as the two lines came abreast on opposite tacks, at about 8.00, James again ordered his fleet to tack from the rear, this time with better success. Carrying out this remarkably difficult manoeuvre while under fire was an astonishing achievement, never to be repeated in the rest of the age of sail…

At about 10 a.m., both sides began a terrific bombardment that lasted for some eight hours, and could be heard plainly in London…Lawson, leading the van again, was wounded (mortally, as it later transpired); his ship dropped out of the line, and his division fell into confusion…The centre and rear divisions of the Red remained to windward, effectively out of the action, leading the commander of the latter (Berkeley of the Swiftsure) to be publicly derided for cowardice; the commander of the former, the Duke of York, also came in for criticism after the battle, though it is possible that Sir William Penn, making the decisions on the flagship, sought to keep the Red apart as a reserve, ready to support any part of the line that required it. Sandwich’s vast but cumbersome Royal Prince and her seconds came under such heavy attack from Obdam’s 84-gun flagship Eendracht and the 76-gun East Indiaman Oranje that James and the Red finally committed to the action and sailed down to relieve them. Sandwich and Rupert both then launched their squadrons into the heart of the Dutch fleet, Sandwich noting that he hoisted ‘my blue flag on the mizzen peak, a sign for my squadron to follow me’.  York’s Royal Charles then fell in alongside the Eendracht, and the two flagships began a murderous duel. At about noon, three courtiers standing next to James on the quarterdeck were killed by one chainshot, and the heir to the throne was splattered with their brains. Obdam, too, was killed, and a little later, at about 2.30 the magazine of the Eendracht exploded, killing all but five of the 409 men on board. The blast, which was probably caused by an error in handling powder, shook houses and blew open windows in The Hague.

The destruction of the Eendracht fully exposed the weaknesses in the Dutch command structure, and the inter-provincial jealousies that blighted their fleet. Kortenaer, Obdam’s nominal deputy, was severely wounded and unable to assume command, but his flag captain kept his pendant flying. Meanwhile, the Amsterdam contingent, led by Cornelis Tromp (son of the great Maarten, killed at Scheveningen), would not accept orders from the next in seniority, Jan Evertsen, a Zeelander, so the afternoon ended in chaos, with three separate ships flying the commander-in-chief’s pendant of distinction. Many ships simply turned and fled. The Dutch were pursued relentlessly by the British squadrons, although the Red was held up for some time by the astonishing attack of the lone East Indiaman Oranje, which took on the Royal Charles herself before gradually succumbing to the steady stream of the duke’s seconds as they came up in turn. Small groups of Dutch ships were cut off and forced to surrender, or were destroyed by fireships…

In all, and including several captures of fleeing ships made on the following morning, the Dutch had lost seventeen ships. Eight had been destroyed, including the three largest, and nine captured. There were about five thousand casualties, twenty per cent of the fleet’s manpower, which included the commander-in-chief and two other flag officers killed. 2,844 prisoners of war were landed in Suffolk in the immediate aftermath of the battle. By contrast, the British had lost one ship and only some 700 men, though these included two flag officers, including Lawson (whose wound turned gangrenous), and the royal favourite Falmouth, one of the three young men scythed down alongside the Duke of York.

***

However, the British failed to exploit their victory. Sail was mysteriously shortened during the night, allowing the Dutch fleet to escape; this was attributed to the actions of a courtier, Henry Brouncker, allegedly acting under orders from the Duke of York. The mystery of Brouncker’s motivation forms part of the plot of the third ‘journal of Matthew Quinton’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, and all the other key events of the battle feature in the story too.

***

Finally, and changing subject entirely, today is the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the Falklands War. I originally started out as a ‘warship buff’, my primary interest being in the Royal Navy’s ships of my childhood and youth, so the war, the first time the navy of that era saw action, was something that made a huge impact on me. I also have some hopefully unique recollections of and perspectives on it that I’ll share on this site in future posts. In the meantime, a Happy Easter to all!

Filed Under: Naval historical fiction, Naval history Tagged With: Battle of Lowestoft, books by J D Davies, Dutch navy, Eendracht, King James II, Naval history, Restoration navy, Royal Charles, Royal Navy history

A Broadside More

30/01/2012 by J D Davies

Cheating this week, I’m afraid…a fairly major work crisis, so no time to write a proper blog! But it’s all for a good cause, and there’ll be some exciting news about the ‘Quinton Journals’ coming soon. In the meantime, here’s a little ditty published in 1665. In fact, this serves a double purpose rather neatly – as well as saving me time, it provides a superb insight into the sorts of mentality, language and anti-Dutch xenophobia that form the backdrop to both The Mountain of Gold and The Blast That Tears The Skies. ‘Hogen Mogen’ was an English nickname for the Dutch, derived from the translation of ‘High Mightinesses’, the form of address used for the States-General of the United Provinces. However, it seems that the author had very little idea of what he was writing about. The action he describes bears little resemblance to the Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, which forms the climax of The Blast That Tears The Skies, and his references to ‘Trump’ clearly refer to Admiral Maarten Tromp, who was killed in 1653 not long after (probably apocryphally) tying a broom to his mast to indicate he had swept the Channel, rather than to his son Cornelis, who was present at Lowestoft. The author is clearly also a rabid Cavalier who praises by name the two royal admirals, the Duke of York and Prince Rupert, but omits any similar mention of the former Parliamentarians, notably the Earl of Sandwich and Sir John Lawson. This tension between the two rival camps, deriving from the bitter legacies of the civil war, is a major plot theme in The Blast…

Filed Under: Historical sources, Naval history Tagged With: Battle of Lowestoft, books by J D Davies, Restoration navy, The Blast That Tears The Skies, The Mountain of Gold

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