J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Charles II

Prize Season

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I’ve had to keep this under my hat for the last couple of months, but now that the decision has been ratified, I’m finally able to announce that I’ve been awarded the Society for Nautical Research’s Anderson Prize for the best maritime history book of 2017, for Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, published by Seaforth. This follows hard on the heels of the same title receiving a Certificate of Merit for the Maritime Foundation’s Mountbatten Award, which has a similar criterion. 

To say I’m humbled by this level of recognition for my work would be a considerable understatement, and having previously also won the Samuel Pepys Prize for Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89, as well as the Julian Corbett Prize for naval history many moons ago, there’s a part of me that still pinches myself and thinks that at any moment, somebody’s going to turn round and cry ‘But that book’s really rubbish! The author knows nothing!’ (Maybe they already have; I haven’t looked at my Amazon and Goodreads reviews for quite a while.) On the other hand, there’s a considerable degree of pride, too, and I wish my parents were still around to share in the moment. But I’m glad that so many people, and in that I include all the followers of this blog, are able to share in it, so thank you, one and all, for your support and encouragement, which have been hugely important motivators for me. 

It’s also particularly gratifying to win the prize named in honour of Doctor Roger Charles Anderson, and humbling to follow in the footsteps of some of the previous recipients, who include the likes of Andrew Lambert, Richard Woodman, Susan Rose and N A M Rodger. I never had the privilege of meeting Anderson – he died just as I was about to embark on the second year of my undergraduate degree – but, when I began serious academic research on the seventeenth century navy a few years later, I quickly became aware of the extraordinary scale of his contribution to maritime research. His listings of contemporary warships and naval captains were among the first secondary sources on the period that I ever studied. When I moved on to work on printed primary sources, the volumes that he edited for the Navy Records Society, notably the journal of Edward Montagu, first Earl of Sandwich, and the Journals and Narratives of the Third Dutch War, swiftly became indispensable (and still are, whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction). They were also among the first source books for the period that I actually bought, and still sit proudly on my shelves – albeit now joined by a handful of others. (Note: the word ‘handful’ might be a slight underestimate.) When I started looking at manuscript sources in the old Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum, his incredibly eclectic personal collection, built up over his long lifetime (he died at 93), proved to be a goldmine, containing many little known but invaluable documents which opened important windows into the seventeenth century.

Gradually, though, I became aware that Anderson was of a rather different stamp to modern-day maritime and naval historians. For one thing, he happily straddled both worlds, writing as much about medieval and early modern Southampton merchant shipping as he did about seventeenth century naval history. Secondly, he didn’t confine himself to one period, or to one narrow field. He wrote incredibly detailed technical studies of ships’ rigging, alongside ‘big picture’ studies of naval warfare in the Mediterranean and the Baltic from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, as well as others which went all the way back to the trireme. These, in turn, were quite a departure from his first book, Canoeing and Camping Adventures (thank you, Wikipedia). In an age where so many historians confine themselves to astonishingly narrow sub-topics of sub-themes of sub-disciplines, his breadth of interests and depth of knowledge are surely examples to us all. Set all that alongside his roles as a founder of both the Society for Nautical Research and the National Maritime Museum, and as a generous benefactor to both of those institutions and the Navy Records Society, and Anderson clearly has to be ranked as one of the titans of maritime history. 

In one respect, however, and only one, I’ll continue steadfastly to reject the example provided by R C Anderson, as I’ve done ever since I first encountered his work, over 35 years ago. According to his obituary in The Mariner’s Mirror- which he edited four times – ‘his writings were often wantonly dull’ (thank you again, Wikipedia). To the best of my ability, I’ve always tried to write books that may have many other failings, but ‘dull’ won’t be one of them. So thank you to the judges for both the Anderson and Mountbatten prizes, and thank you again to all those who have bought or read Kings of the Sea!

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Come in Number Thirteen, Your Time Has Come

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Last week saw the official publication of my new non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, from the wonderful people at Seaforth Publishing. By my reckoning, this is my thirteenth complete book, and my fifth non-fiction title, to add to eight novels to date. But even I’m losing track of the total number, mainly because there are distinct grey areas. For example, there’s the Quinton prequel Ensign Royal…but that’s only a novella, and only available in e-format, so does that count? OK, maybe I should count that as half a book, which takes me to thirteen and a half. Then there’s the cult bestseller 20th Century Naval Dockyards: Devonport and Portsmouth Characterisation Report, where I’m credited as a co-author. So if I count that as a quarter, I get up to thirteen and three-quarters, and can thus legitimately claim to be the Adrian Mole of authors!

Of course, I’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the phenomenal Professor Jeremy Black, author of well over one hundred full length, fully referenced historical works (and counting) – so many, indeed, that even he seems to have lost track of his publications since 2015. Sometimes, especially after about the third glass, I’ve speculated that Jeremy must be definitive proof that human cloning is already happening, because surely nothing else can explain his prolific rate of publication.

Seriously, though, I’m delighted to see Kings of the Sea in print. For me, it marks the culmination of 35 years of work on the naval history of the Restoration age: and to both further explain the rationale behind it, and to provide a little ‘teaser trailer’ for it, here’s the first part of my preface, followed by the first part of the introduction.

Warning: these are among the least controversial sections of the book.

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To the best of my recollection, I first conceived the idea of writing a book rather like this one over thirty years ago, when I was locked in Samuel Pepys’s library.

The Pepys Library. Behind the shuttered windows on the first floor sits a historian, longing to munch on a cheese sandwich and starting to worry about the faint smell of burning.

This was not quite the dire emergency, nor the unexpected proof of the feasibility of time travel, that it might sound. Pepys’s glorious bequest to his old Cambridge college, Magdalene, stands four square alongside the River Cam, and contains many of the great man’s papers, contained within exactly 3,000 of his books, no more, no less – arranged, uniquely, in order of size, from the smallest to the largest. When I was working there extensively in the 1980s, the library opened to the public for an hour in the morning, from 11.30 to 12.30, and another in the afternoon, from 2.30 to 3.30; but by prior arrangement, researchers could continue to work through the two hours in between, when the doors of the library were firmly bolted. This necessitated either a very early lunch or a very late one, not to mention unwavering faith in the fire prevention facilities of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and it is hardly surprising that this delightful laissez faire policy eventually fell foul of the relentless advance of ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. But the two hour lock-in, alone with Samuel Pepys’s books, many of them full of the letters written by him to, or send it to him from, the likes of King Charles II and King James II, gave ample time for one’s thoughts to wander in all kinds of directions. One of them involved contemplation of a paradox. In many periods of history, and in many topics of historical study, the role of monarchs has probably been studied more exhaustively than their actual importance often merits, contributing to an overwhelmingly ‘top down’ view of history (and, yes, an often overwhelmingly male one too, for that is what monarchs usually were). The naval history of late seventeenth century Britain is a marked exception. There, if anything, the monarchs have been placed in the background, and in some books, their contributions appear nearly invisible, overshadowed by an even more dominant figure. That person is regarded almost universally as the driving force behind all that happened in the navy of his day, the individual responsible for all that was good and important, the unimpeachable authority for all that took place in naval affairs. I got to know this person very well: after all, I was often locked in his library.

The feeling that Samuel Pepys was, perhaps, not quite as responsible for all that happened in the navy of the Restoration era as posterity believes (essentially because Pepys told posterity what to believe, and posterity duly complied), and that the contributions to naval history of the Stuart brothers, Charles and James, have been somewhat neglected, stayed with me in the years that followed. Indeed, several of the themes and ideas explored in this book first saw the light of day in a number of essays and articles, most of them published in obscure academic journals and collections of essays: which is a polite way of saying ‘nobody read them’. But during the years that followed, other priorities always intervened to take me away from this book.

Now, though, it’s time to set the record straight…

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And from the introduction (with the references deleted) –

At some point during the afternoon of 30 June 1675, the King of England disappeared.

In many European states of the period, this would have triggered immediate panic. Kings were still regarded by many as little gods upon Earth; the entire political and social order was based, to some extent, on knowing where they were. Both before and since the seventeenth century, there have been countless instances where the sudden disappearance of a head of state has triggered anything from bouts of religious hysteria, to rioting in the streets, to full scale revolutions. But for at least some of those who knew about it, King Charles II’s disappearance on 30 June probably caused little more than a mild frisson of concern, perhaps no more than a few disapproving shakes of the head.

Because the king had gone sailing.

Yet again.

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Charles II in his sailing outfit

The royal cruise of 1675 involved seven royal yachts and three small frigates. This flotilla set off from Gravesend on 26 June, with the king aboard the Sixth Rate man-of-war Greyhound. A further eight warships, including the Third Rate Harwich and two fireships, joined them in the Downs. Bad weather delayed progress, causing the ‘disappearance’ of the flotilla not once, but several times; the Katherine Yacht lost touch entirely, and was believed to have been lost, while the yacht carrying the Speaker of the House of Commons had to turn back from the Downs. Progress was so slow that the royal party missed the principal object of the voyage, namely attending the launch of the great new First Rate man-of-war Royal James at Portsmouth Dockyard on 29 June. As it was, the other ships in the royal flotilla lost sight of the Greyhound during the ‘very stormy and dark weather’ on the night of 29-30 June, when they were on the west side of the Isle of Wight – a coast notorious for shipwrecks. The vessels sighted each other again in the morning, and the yachts carrying the king’s brother and heir, the Duke of York, and Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, went into Portsmouth. But once again, there was no sign of the Greyhound, which the others expected to make for the Isle of Wight. By early evening, none of the fires which would have signalled a sighting of the ship flying the royal standard could be seen anywhere on the island. At eight the next morning, both James and Monmouth set sail to see if they could find the king. Whether either, or both, wondered for even the most fleeting moment whether Charles had drowned in a catastrophic shipwreck, which would have meant that James was already King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, will never be known. In fact, the Greyhound had lain to ‘in very rough weather’ off Dunnose Head until the morning of 1 July, when Charles got ashore in a shallop. He was met by the governor of the island, the outspoken, buccaneering old admiral Sir Robert Holmes, who took him off to a ‘good dinner’ at Yarmouth, where the Duke of York eventually caught up with him. Charles finally came into Portsmouth harbour at one in the morning on 2 July. The Venetian ambassador said of the king’s disappearance that ‘anxiety was universal’, and that his reappearance was greeted by ‘unspeakable relief’. Despite the alarm that had been caused, one courtier reported that ‘this stormy voyage has not at all discouraged his Majesty from the sea, and all he can be persuaded to is only to change his ship and return in the Harwich, a good Third Rate frigate, but he will by no means hearken to any proposition of returning by land, notwithstanding all manner of conveniences and supplications have been proposed to him’.

This dramatic voyage was by no means the only, nor the most ambitious, royal voyage of the reign. In July 1671, the king and Duke of York went overland to Portsmouth, where they viewed the new warships St Michael, Royal James and Edgar. They and their retinues then embarked in seven yachts, which, with six escorting warships, sailed for Plymouth, where they arrived on the seventeenth; the extended voyage also saw the royal flotilla call at Dartmouth. The king’s informality during this expedition startled many, and still ‘shocks historians accustomed to the near scripted progress of most baroque monarchs’; he arrived at Portsmouth unexpectedly early, and left Plymouth so abruptly that the mayor and corporation had to pursue him to Mount Edgecumbe in their own boat in order to take formal leave. Describing this voyage, the chief minister, the Earl of Arlington, said of his king (revealing a little of his nervousness in the process), ‘twenty leagues [by sea] are more pleasing to him than two by land. It is a new exploit for kings, but I hope God will bless him in it…’ 1677 saw another expedition to Plymouth. The royal party arrived at Portsmouth on 10 August, where the king and Duke of York inspected the new fortifications and the ships under construction in the dockyard, before sailing on to Plymouth, where they arrived on the sixteenth. The king inspected the Royal Citadel and dined at Mount Edgecumbe house before sailing for home on the eighteenth. So impressed was he by the experience that he vowed to repeat the trip every other year, and it has been suggested that only the subsequent political crisis of several years’ duration prevented him doing so.

As well as these substantial voyages, the king and his brother regularly sailed down the Thames to Sheerness or the Nore and back, outings so frequent that they rarely attracted any comment or attention at all. Moreover, these were not decadent pleasure cruises where downtrodden mariners worked the yacht while the king dallied with his latest mistress in the stern cabin. Charles and James often took the helms themselves, taking great delight in racing each other. On 1 October 1661, the diarist John Evelyn witnessed a race between the royal siblings:

I sailed this morning with His Majesty in one of his yachts (or pleasure boats), vessels not known among us till the Dutch East India Company [sic] presented that curious piece to the King, being very excellent sailing vessels. It was on a wager between his other new pleasure boat, built frigate-like, and one of the Duke of York’s, the wager £100; the race from Greenwich to Gravesend and back. The King lost it going, the wind being contrary, but saved stakes in returning. There were divers noble persons and lords on board, his Majesty sometimes steering himself. His barge and kitchen boat attended. I brake fast this morning with the King at return in his smaller vessel [the Bezan], he being pleased to take me and only four more, who were noblemen, with him, but dined in his yacht, where we all eat together with His Majesty.

‘Messing about on boats’ was an integral part of the macho, competitive culture of the Restoration court, along with the similarly energetic male pursuits of hunting, horse racing, and fornicating. So when one poet described King Charles in distinctly North Korean terms as Britain’s ‘great pilot’, he was using the term both literally and metaphorically.

Even so, the potentially history-changing implications of the royal passion for the sea were very real, even on the jaunts downriver. In July 1662, the king was caught

in a furious gale at the mouth of the Thames…the mast was broken, the sails torn, the sailors dismayed, and all in disorder he was thrown on the banks of Lie [sic; presumably Leigh-on-Sea in Essex]…and was obliged to stay there for several hours exposed to the fury of the waves, until the tide fell and the wind dropping, he could reach a safer place.

The dangers were illustrated even more dramatically by the loss of the Gloucester, on 6 May 1682. This was not some tiny, fragile royal yacht, but a powerful sixty-gun Third Rate man-of-war. She was carrying the Duke of York and a large party of courtiers back to Leith, where James was to retrieve his wife, left behind when their previous sojourn at Holyrood ended unexpectedly with his summons back to London. The voyage should have been routine, through one of the best known and most frequented seaways in British waters. But somehow, a catastrophic navigational error was made, and the ship struck the Lemon and Oare sandbank off Great Yarmouth. The mistake was largely James’ own fault: he seems to have taken command himself, having lost confidence in the Gloucester’s highly experienced pilot James Aires, and ordered a course change that proved fatal. About 130 passengers and crew were killed, including the Earl of Roxburgh, Lord Hopetoun, and James’ brother-in-law, James Hyde. Those who escaped included the Marquis of Montrose, Samuel Pepys (who was sailing in the escorting Katherine Yacht, not the Gloucester), and John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough. Above all, James, Duke of York, survived the shipwreck, albeit only just. He stayed aboard the ship until very nearly too late, and then had to climb out of one of the stern windows, with Churchill having at swordpoint to hold off the press of men trying to clamber into the duke’s boat. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is inescapable: the lives of Charles and James Stuart were threatened more immediately, and much more often, by the vagaries of the sea, than by the bullets and daggers of potential assassins.

Want to read the rest? Then get the book now, and don’t wait for the dodgy illegal Russian ‘free’ PDF that puts a virus on your laptop and destroys your hard drive! 

Kings on the Way

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Cue drum roll… I’m delighted to be able to announce that my new non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, has gone off to Seaforth Publishing, and should be published next summer. And here, for the first time online, is the cover –

In many ways, I feel that Kings of the Sea marks the culmination of the work I’ve done on the Restoration navy over more than thirty years. The book radically reassesses the working relationship of three men, and their contributions to the history of the navy – the men in question being Kings Charles and James, and the great naval administrator who served them both, Samuel Pepys. It also challenges some of the assessments of the two kings which appear in some of the principal studies of their lives, and aims to confront head-on the still common assumption that it is perfectly possible to write a major history of Britain during the late seventeenth century which effectively ignores the navy. So the book is often provocative, sometimes controversial, and doesn’t pull its punches. I’m expecting it to raise eyebrows and hackles in equal measure!

One of the other things I’ve tried to do in the book is to set the attitudes to naval matters of Charles and James in the context of the Stuart dynasty’s entire relationship with the sea. So the first chapter examines the Scottish monarchs of the line, and their sometimes remarkable involvement in naval warfare, especially under James IV and James V. This chapter also covers James VI and I’s English reign, often seen as a ‘dark age’ of naval history. In the second chapter, I take a look at Charles I, the Sovereign of the Seas, and the early seafaring experiences of his sons, Charles and James; the chapter ends just after the Restoration, with the astonishing naval elements of Charles II’s coronation procession.

In the third chapter, I analyse the ship naming policy of the royal brothers – and if that sounds dull, it’s anything but! This chapter takes some material originally published on this blog and expands it considerably, looking at the ways in which the choice of ship names was incredibly political, and actually remarkably revealing of the Stuarts’ thinking about political issues at different points in their reigns. Chapter Four goes on to study the extent and nature of the royal brothers’ interest in, and technical knowledge of, the art of shipbuilding, concentrating particularly on Charles. I have to admit to a particular soft spot for Chapter Five, which looks at the use of the royal yachts – and many of the uses are very far removed from what we might expect of vessels traditionally described as ‘pleasure boats’! In fact, the story of the yachts casts unexpected light on some ‘hidden histories’ of the reigns of the Stuart monarchs, and reveals some startling new evidence about, for instance, Charles II’s attitude to Catholics during the ‘Exclusion Crisis’.

In Chapter Six, ‘Governing the Navy’, I look at the roles of both Charles and James in naval administration, and how they interacted with Pepys. This chapter is connected to an appendix, and taken together, they provide a radical new interpretation of how the navy was actually run during the Restoration age. Chapter Seven takes me back to my most familiar stamping ground of all, the officer corps of the Stuart navy. But after all these years, I’ve found plenty of new things to say about it, to ask questions that I didn’t ask when I first worked on the subject, and to present answers that have sometimes startled me, let alone any potential readers.

Chapters Eight and Nine are, in some ways, the heart of the book’s line of argument. They focus on the claim of seventeenth century monarchs to be ‘sovereigns of the seas’ around Britain’s coasts; but whereas this theme has often been approached from a legalistic angle, I concentrate on the ways in which this claim generated incessant clashes with many other states, and, above all, the ways in which it made the Stuarts’ relationship with France rather more fraught than is sometimes assumed. But it was also a part of a wider agenda which embraced overseas colonies, the activities of the Royal Society, voyages of exploration, and even the establishment of the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital – all themes which are analysed here.

Chapter Ten, ‘Warlords’, does what it says on the tin, and analyses the roles of Charles and James as war leaders. To what extent were the strategic blunders of the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars the fault of the former, and the tactical failings of the wars the fault of the latter? The chapter reassesses such momentous events as the Battle of Solebay (1672) and places them in the context of the Stuarts’ personal ambitions. In Chapter Eleven, James finally takes the stage on his own, as King – and although I’ve written detailed studies of the navy’s part in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ twice before, I was still slightly taken aback by the amount of new evidence I was able to unearth, and the very different perspectives that these gave me.

Finally, Chapter Twelve returns to the overarching theme of ‘the Stuarts and the Sea’, and looks at ‘The Jacobite Navy’. And before you all chorus ‘there’s no such thing!’ (‘oh yes there is!’…etc), the naval side of the Jacobite movement is actually fundamentally important to any understanding of the entire subject – after all, and to put in the crudest possible terms, how, exactly, were the Old and Young Pretenders and their supporters meant to physically get to the British Isles? I had huge fun with this chapter, and managed to work in mentions – and relevant mentions to boot! – of Nelson, Blackbeard, Irish poetry, Peter the Great, and my old friends the Stepney family.

So all in all, I’m reasonably pleased with the way Kings of the Sea has turned out. It’ll also be lavishly illustrated, thanks to the wonderful people at Seaforth Publishing, and I’ve taken the opportunity to include plenty of images that, to the best of my knowledge, haven’t previously been seen in an English language book. So if you’re one of those unbelievably efficient people who’s already completed their Christmas shopping for this year, may I recommend Kings of the Sea to you for your 2017 list?