J D Davies - Historian and Author

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The Real Tarpaulins, Part 2

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This week, a couple more ‘tarpaulin’ officers whose lives provided inspiration for the character of Kit Farrell in ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’. I’ll conclude the series next week with a look at probably the most famous tarpaulins of the age – the closely interconnected Norfolk admirals Christopher Myngs, John Narbrough and Cloudesley Shovell.

The Munden brothers – The careers of Sir Richard and Sir John Munden were particularly remarkable in two respects. First, they were particularly low-born, even for ‘tarpaulin’ officers; their father was the ferryman at Chelsea, although this was actually quite a lucrative employment, given the absence of bridges on that stretch of the Thames. Secondly, they rose to prominence at a time when opportunities for promotion for their kind were becoming ever more limited because of the increasing dominance of the ‘gentlemen captains’. That they were able to achieve what they did can only be a tribute to their own abilities.

Richard was born in about 1640, which would effectively make him an exact contemporary of both Kit Farrell and Matthew Quinton. He served in merchant ships prior to the second Anglo-Dutch war, entering the navy in 1666 as captain of the Swallow Ketch. He commanded a sloop in 1668 and then became master attendant at Deptford dockyard before commanding the Fourth Rate Princess in 1672. In the following year he took command of the Assistance, tasked with escorting outward bound East Indiamen as far as St Helena. Unknown to Munden, the Dutch had captured the island before he got there. He immediately launched an attack, and in addition to recapturing the island he snapped up three homeward-bound Dutch East Indiamen. His success led to a knighthood  and later to another plum command, the large Fourth Rate St David, employed on convoy work in the Mediterranean. Munden died shortly after the ship returned to England in 1680. He was buried in Bromley church, where his monument states ‘having been (what upon public duty, and what upon merchants’ accounts) successfully engaged in fourteen sea-fights … he died in the prime of his youth and strength, in the 40th year of his age’. The post-mortem inventory of his house in Bromley (where there is still a block of flats called ‘Munden House’) revealed an estate worth almost £6000, including shares in four merchant ships, chairs and carpets from Turkey, other materials from India, and a ‘Japan cabinet’. Munden left five daughters and a son, Richard, who later became a general in the army.

Richard’s prominence in the 1670s meant that he was able to promote the career of his younger brother John, who had been born in about 1645 but whose first thirty years of life are shrouded in obscurity. From 1677-80, though, John was his brother’s lieutenant in the St David, subsequently gaining several more lieutenancies before obtaining the command of a fireship in 1688. In 1689 he became flag captain to Lord Berkeley, Rear-Admiral of the Red squadron, and held the same post under Berkeley’s successor Sir Ralph Delaval aboard the Coronation, in which he fought at the disastrous Battle of Beachy Head (1690). From 1691 to 1693 he commanded the Lenox (the subject of Restoration Warship, a superb book by my good friend Richard Endsor, the cover artist of Gentleman Captain), fighting in her at the Battle of Barfleur in May 1692. He commanded various large ships in the latter stages of the Nine Years War and was promoted Rear-Admiral in 1701, when William III knighted him.

In January 1702 Munden took command of a squadron tasked with intercepting a powerful French force expected to sail from Rochelle to Corunna, then on to the West Indies. He cruised off Corunna but the French evaded him during the night and got safely into port. He considered the harbour too well defended and narrow to contemplate an attack. He was court-martialled for negligence on 13 July but acquitted, and returned to his command. However, public opinion had been highly critical of him for not pursuing the French into Corunna harbour, and the privy council was dissatisfied with his acquittal. Queen Anne and her ministers yielded to the public pressure and dismissed him. This is an excellent example of how public opinion had become an important factor in naval policy by about 1700; it had certainly not been so to the same degree in Charles II’s reign, and its increasing importance during the eighteenth century would ultimately lead to such dramas as the execution of Admiral Byng and the Keppel-Palliser court-martial in 1778. Meanwhile Sir John Munden retired to Chelsea, where he was described in his old age as ‘a very plain man in his conversation and dress, of a fair complexion’. He died on 13 March 1719.

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 1

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In recent posts, I’ve looked at the lives of some of the real ‘gentleman captains’ who became models for my fictional character, Matthew Quinton. Drawn from the aristocracy and gentry, often possessing very little prior experience of the sea, the ‘gentlemen’ became increasingly dominant in the navy of Charles II and Samuel Pepys. By doing so, they gradually restricted the opportunities for ‘tarpaulins’ to rise to command – men like Matthew’s friend Kit Farrell, professional seamen who had either worked their way up through warrant officer posts or had come in from the merchant service. (These career paths often overlapped; like the seamen themselves, ‘tarpaulins’ frequently moved between naval and merchant ships during the course of their careers.) In this and the next couple of posts, I’ll outline the careers of a few tarpaulin officers who provided inspiration for the character of Kit.

Sir John Berry, c.1636-90 – Berry’s background was respectable; he was the son of a Devon vicar. But his father was removed from his living for Anglican and royalist tendencies, so the family fell into poverty and John and his brothers had to seek a living as best they could. He served in merchant ships before moving into the navy after the Restoration. By 1663 he was boatswain of the Swallow Ketch in the Caribbean, and when the command fell vacant, Berry was appointed to it by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford, a fellow Devonian who was related to George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, the architect of the Restoration and joint admiral of the fleet in 1666. These connections benefited Berry when he returned to England in the latter year; Albemarle gave him several commands, and in 1667 he went back to the Caribbean as captain of the hired ship Coronation, commanding the squadron which won the Battle of Nevis against the French in May 1667. This success cemented Berry’s reputation. He held several important commands before the outbreak of the third Anglo-Dutch war; when that began he was given command of the Third Rate Resolution, earning his knighthood for his defence of the Duke of York’s flagship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672), and he also served in all three major battles in 1673. In 1676-7 he went to Virginia in command of the Bristol, leading the naval forces assigned to put down ‘Bacon’s rebellion’. So respected was Berry that in 1680-1 King Charles II entrusted him with the naval training of his illegitimate son the Duke of Grafton during a Mediterranean cruise aboard the frigate Leopard.

In 1682 he was given command of the Gloucester, carrying the Duke of York to Scotland, but the ship was wrecked off the Norfolk coast. No blame attached to Berry; quite the opposite, as it was probably only his efforts that saved the heir to the throne’s life. In 1683 he went to Tangier as vice-admiral of the fleet tasked with evacuating the expensive English colony. During the voyage he befriended Samuel Pepys, a relationship that paid dividends in 1686 when Berry was appointed to Pepys’s special commission for rebuilding the navy. In 1688 Berry became rear-admiral of the fleet entrusted with defending against William of Orange’s invasion, but he was staunchly anti-French and anti-Catholic, becoming an active Williamite conspirator and even got involved in a plot to kidnap the admiral, Lord Dartmouth. Berry’s health deteriorated markedly through 1689 and he died on 14 February 1690, being buried at Stepney church.

Berry did very well out of his naval service: at his death he owned a house in Mile End and other property in Middlesex and Kent. Perhaps his greatest failing was a tendency toward immodesty. He was an outstanding seaman, greatly respected by the men, and he lost no opportunity to trumpet his own competence and popularity. Ultimately, though, his career had owed much to those two vital factors for the success of any 17th century naval officer: luck and good connections.

History and Fiction

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I thought I’d take a brief break from my accounts of ‘the real gentlemen captains’ to give my impressions of last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London, Novel Approaches: From Academic History to Historical Fiction, which continues this week in virtual form. First of all it was great fun, and it was good to meet and to listen to other people with similar enthusiasms to my own – although it was somewhat disconcerting to enter the hall and discover that roughly 80-90% of the delegates were female (one of them asked me at lunchtime if I was feeling outnumbered, which I definitely was!). It was particularly interesting to hear from others with a similar background to my own, i.e. people who started out as academic historians and then crossed over to write historical fiction, notably Alison Weir and Ian Mortimer. There was much discussion of the need to be ‘authentic’, but not entire agreement on what’s meant by ‘authenticity’; some authors clearly go to enormous lengths to ensure that there are no factual anachronisms in their work and that they comply entirely with the known historical record, while others (such as Mortimer, when writing fiction under his alias James Forrester) prefer to be ‘authentic’ in a broader way, to the sense and atmosphere of the period. I’m firmly in the latter camp, but this might be because authors like Mortimer and myself, who have been steeped in academic research on our periods for well over twenty years, possibly have a more instinctive feel for that atmosphere (and for the language of the time, etc) than someone researching a period from scratch, who might be more anxious to avoid making even minor factual errors, to alter the chronology, or to take liberties – up to a point – with the known life stories of real people. From an entertainment viewpoint, undoubtedly the highlight of the conference for me was the contribution by the literary agent Peter Straus, who emphasised the continuing primacy of word of mouth as the best means of promoting a book, the importance of luck (notably lacking in the case of the US edition of The Instance of the Fingerpost, published in the week that Diana died), the notion of the Booker Prize-winning formula (‘myth, love and history’, a la A S Byatt) and the lack of omniscience of publishers; hence the horrified initial reaction of the sales and marketing department to C J Sansum’s stunningly successful Shardlake series, namely ‘hunchbacks don’t sell’ (presumably forgetting what Shakespeare did with Richard III).

However, I think the main thing I took away from the conference was the increased acceptance from all parties that academic history and historical fiction aren’t two sides of a great divide, but are both staging posts in a spectrum – and both, indeed, are simplifications to a greater or lesser degree. Academic history used to like to see itself as a disinterested pursuit of truth; as Simon Schama put it, historians are ‘party poopers’, demolishing the widely accepted myths that the public is comfortable with. (Perhaps therefore historical novelists are ‘party animals’, perpetuating the myths – e.g. Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker with ‘mud, blood and donkeys’ in World War I – and dealing with those things that historians dare not touch because they lie beyond the boundaries of the sources, such as people’s emotions, such big issues as loyalties and beliefs, and the ‘what ifs’ of history). However, as several speakers stressed, academic history itself is increasingly seen as a fictive concept: historians select and interpret their material with greater or lesser degrees of subjectivity, while even ‘primary sources’ aren’t the beginning of a process but the end of one. They are the recording of an event that has already taken place, and are thus themselves subject to selection and subjectivity, rather like modern TV or newspaper reporting; or as Arthur Marwick used to put it, ‘history’ is actually the artificial construct, the prism, through which we study the totality which was ‘the past’, only a minute fraction of which we can ever recreate. I think this realisation that history and fiction aren’t really so far apart after all reflects the fact that academic history, once remarkably hierarchical and even snobbish, has become rather more tolerant and inclusive in the last 15-20 years or so. When I started work on my doctorate in the early 1980s there was a definite ‘pecking order’, with political and religious history at the top – the former, for my period, dominated by such titans as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and Hugh Trevor-Roper, all of whom I encountered at once time or another. (In Trevor-Roper’s case, this involved knocking him off his bike when rushing to his lecture; as far as I know, the trauma he might have suffered from my carelessness has never been advanced as a possible cause of his subsequent faux pas in authenticating the Hitler diaries.) Economic history was tolerated, social history was mainstream thanks to the likes of Hobsbawm and Thompson but was still not entirely respectable, while naval history was regarded very much as an unfashionable and insignificant backwater (although then probably still more ‘mainstream’ than gender and race history, etc).

Thus I was something of an exotic beast at Oxford historical seminars in the mid-1980s, although the tide was already turning. Indeed, the very fact that I was taken on as a DPhil student by Gerald Aylmer, one of the most eminent political historians of the day, has been used in a recent study of the progress of naval history as proof that things were changing. Now there is a chair in naval history at King’s College, London; a naval historian holds a fellowship of All Souls; Cambridge runs a maritime history workshop; and the numbers of those studying naval history at such institutions as King’s, Greenwich and Exeter probably run into hundreds. So maybe I’ll live to see a professorship in historical fiction at Oxford, but perhaps we’ll only be certain that all the barriers really have come down when David Starkey writes a sex-filled Tudor bodice ripper (ideally with a black protagonist) or Niall Ferguson succeeds Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver as the author of the next Bond novel, in which Q gives Bond six really ‘killer apps’. But I won’t hold my breath.

Don’t Tell Your Mother

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Apologies for missing my usual posting date last week. I’ve been in Wales for 10 days or so, packing in a lot of research and fieldwork for my new non-fiction book Britannia’s Dragon. I’ve had intermittent internet access and also managed to forget my access codes for the blog…

Anyway, I thought I’d get back on track with a marvellous little source that I found last week in Pembrokeshire’s  county record office. This is a wonderfully old-fashioned institution housed in a converted Georgian prison, itself located within the walls of a lofty hilltop medieval castle. In this letter, written on 7 June 1743, concerned father John Thomas of Posty, Pembrokeshire, writes to his son Vaughan, who has run away to sea after a family argument and entered himself on the ship’s books of HMS Princess Amelia, lying at Plymouth. The letter demonstrates that the cross-currents of angst, guilt and emotional blackmail that underpin many family relationships are as old as the hills –

‘we are all glad to hear that you are well, your mother and sister and self lost years at the reading of your letter. We expected to hear that you designed to return homewards, your mother has been ill of the rheumatism ever since you parted…there is not a day or night but that she sheds tears about your going away, pray if possible return home…We are informed that it is like to be very troublesome both at sea and land and that several worthy men have lately lost their lives at the West Indies, we desire you to consider both of the times and of the hot season, as to what your mother and myself proposed to give as the present you may assure yourself of it if you return home and settle with us. Pray let us hear how you were received when you went first on board, and what post you have had, we thought that you had no need of going into a man of war but leave such a place to those that had most need of having a sufficiency provided as we thought for you here. We desire you to consider seriously of it, and as to your having any preferment at sea, I think you are too old and besides one that never used the sea, and as to what [differences] have been between us here, your mother and self desires it might be forgotten…’

Vaughan evidently left the navy but does not appear to have returned home, as a couple of years later he was living in Bristol. One of the things I particularly like about this letter is the way in which the father constantly tries, and fails, to conceal his own feelings about the matter, which are clearly complicated – although he shares his wife’s anxieties, his own concern for family dignity also comes through in his request to know what status Vaughan has aboard the ship. But best of all is his attempt to make the young man feel guilty by implying that the mother’s attack of rheumatism is all his fault!

I’ll compensate for the recent hiatus in the blog before the end of this week by posting a fairly epic analysis of the current debate on changing the royal succession rules, placing them in the context of the little-known succession crisis of 1667-72. More interesting than it sounds. Yes, honestly, it is. Trust me.

Stepney 200

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Last Monday, 3 October, marked the 200th anniversary of the death of a lesser known but fascinating figure of the Regency age: Sir John Stepney, Baronet, sometime ambassador to Dresden and Berlin. Stepney died at Trnava in modern-day Slovakia, and in many respects his afterlife proved as memorable as his 68 years of living. He gave instructions that he should receive what was essentially an atheist funeral, but the local authorities seem instead to have given him both a Protestant and a Catholic service. His will was dominated by two principal themes: the construction of a particularly byzantine entail, the implications of which occupied and perplexed his heirs for over a century, and the arrangements for the transportation of his pet pug Carlino back to England, through the heart of war-torn Napoleonic Europe. (The dog died on the journey, but Sir John’s valets claimed the reward specified in the will by dumping the canine corpse on the doorstep of the ex-mistress he had named as the recipient.) A fashionable ‘macaroni’ in his younger days, and eminent enough to have been painted by Reynolds, Stepney was a close friend of Charles James Fox and a part of the Prince of Wales’s circle, connections that led to his appointment as an ambassador. At Berlin he had audiences with Frederick the Great, then nearing the end of his reign, and reported Frederick’s blunt opinion that the new United States of America was far too big to last for very long and was as doomed to failure as any union of European nations would be. Opinions of his ambassadorial service were mixed. Nathaniel Wraxall, who visited him in Dresden in 1778, praised the ‘hospitality and polished manners’ of ‘one of the finest gentlemen to have been employed on missions during the present reign’, but one critic snidely attack both Stepney and his mother: ‘Sir J- S-, who saunters about the assemblies of Dresden in honour of his royal master, is a gay young man, of an elegant taste, and with an estate most heavily encumbered by a dowager, who makes life too agreeable to think of leaving it.’ (The dowager Lady Stepney had a formidable temper and an eccentric personality, perhaps best encapsulated in her decision to name her favourite dog Serpent.)

Sir John’s pleasures were principally the turf (disastrously), the card tables (ditto) and women (with mixed success). He never married, but fathered three acknowledged illegitimate sons and a fourth reputed one. His most passionate liaison was probably that with Lady Almeria Carpenter, one of the great court beauties of the 1770s; unfortunately, though, she was also notoriously dim. They were engaged to be married, but it seems likely that his seduction of her, leading to the birth of the boy who became Lieutenant-Colonel Orlando John Williams of the Newfoundland Regiment, ended the relationship. She soon took up with a far more illustrious lover, the Duke of Gloucester, the most bovine of the brothers of King George III. (Stepney got his own back in due course; he seems to have become the lover of the Duchess of Cumberland, widow of another of the brothers.)

Stepney came from an intriguing and influential family, one which bore a name that remains a byword to a quarter of the world’s population: in the Indian sub-continent and Brazil, a ‘Stepney’ is still the name for a vehicle’s spare tyre. The bloodline also produced George Stepney, diplomat, poet and leading member of the Kit Kat Club during Queen Anne’s reign, as well as close friends of an eclectic range of prominent figures from Gladstone and Tennyson to Karl Marx and Dylan Thomas. John’s younger brother Tom was one of the most recognisable eccentrics in London clubland and also served as a witty Blackadder-like groom of the bedchamber to the Prince Regent’s brother, the ‘grand old Duke of York’. Their parents had inhabited one of the most spectacular Georgian houses in Wales, Llanelly House – now being restored by a dynamic project team, and due to open to the public in 2013. I’ve been working on a book about the family for about 15 years now, and hope that its appearance will coincide roughly with the opening of the great house; I’ll cover other aspects of the history of the Stepneys in subsequent blogs. As part of the ongoing research for the book, I hope to be able to visit Trnava one day fairly soon and to pay my respects properly to that fascinating old rogue, Sir John Stepney.