J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Earl of Ossory

You Can Fool Some of the People Some of the Time (Redux)

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The current media storm about ‘alternative facts’ put me in mind of a post I first published on 1 November 2011, when this blog was read by two men, a dog, and a vole called Kevin. So I thought I’d re-post it now for a rather wider audience, especially as it chimes neatly with some of the themes I’m exploring in my new book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy. In that, I deal with some of the instances where Samuel Pepys peddled his own ‘alternative facts’, many of which have been accepted uncritically by pretty much all writers. But as I’ll be demonstrating in Kings of the Sea, several important measures for which Pepys claimed the credit, and which historians and biographers have invariably been prepared to accept as being his responsibility, were not actually his doing at all, or not entirely so – and one entire source which he produced, and which has always been treated by historians as ‘gospel’ evidence for what happened in the navy, is, in fact, seriously flawed and misleading. So the book is likely to get quite a few people’s backs up…

However, back in 2011, I raised some questions about the veracity of the other great diarist of the Restoration period, John Evelyn, after first talking about a book I was then reading as part of my research for Britannia’s Dragon. Time to fire up the DeLorean, Marty!

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Just finished two books on my Kindle – Roy Hattersley’s biography of Lloyd George (which showed the old goat to be even more randy and devious than I’d ever realised) and Anthony Dalton’s Wayward Sailor, an exposé of another brazen old rogue, the bestselling sailing guru Tristan Jones. Despite a schmaltzy and overblown prose style, Dalton does a meticulous job of dissecting Jones’s wildly exaggerated claims, proving that many of the experiences he recorded in his wildly successful ‘non-fiction’ books were either partly or wholly invented. I’m particularly interested in Jones because he claimed to be Welsh (although the ‘Llangareth’ where he claimed he grew up doesn’t exist) and to have served in the Royal Navy throughout World War II, being torpedoed three times and being present at the sinking of the Bismarck, among many other adventures recounted in his wartime ‘memoir’ Heart of Oak. Unfortunately, as Dalton shows Jones was actually born in 1929, not 1924 as he claimed, and thus could not possibly have served in the war; in fact, he did not join the navy until 1946. Heart of Oak is thus a complete invention, unlike some of the books about his sailing exploits which are at least vaguely grounded on truth. Yet remarkably, it continues to fool some. By coincidence, I was recently sent a review copy of a new book on the Royal Navy in World War II by an eminent authority in the field, and was amazed to discover that the author was citing Heart of Oak as a valid historical source. (I’ll save the author’s blushes, at least until my review appears in print!) We all make mistakes in our research, and I’ve sometimes been as guilty as anyone of not checking sufficiently on the provenance of a source, but even a simple check of Wikipedia would have revealed the extent of Jones’s invention.

This put me in mind of an unsettling discovery I made a few years ago. As far as I know no-one has ever queried the authenticity of John Evelyn’s diary,  but among the seventy-odd entries I wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography were those on two men whom Evelyn knew well, Edward, Earl of Sandwich (the patron of Evelyn’s friend Pepys) and Thomas, Earl of Ossory, one of the most charismatic figures at the Restoration court (and one of the nicest, although he’s sadly little known these days). In both cases, Evelyn recounted stories about the end of the men’s lives that were simply not true. The diarist describes a meeting with Sandwich shortly before the latter joined his flagship, the Royal James, which was destroyed by a fireship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672). He told Evelyn that he ‘was utterly against this war from the beginning’, and  regarded his own prospects fatalistically: when he parted from Evelyn, ‘shaking me by the hand he bid me good-bye, and said he thought he should see me no more … “No”, says he, “they will not have me live … I must do something, I know not what, to save my reputation”’. It’s perfectly possible that Sandwich spoke to Evelyn in those terms, but if he made the statement that he was against the war from the beginning, he was either lying outright or cleverly concealing one very important fact. Unknown to Evelyn or the earl’s subsequent biographers, Sandwich was the principal English signatory of the secret Anglo-French naval treaty of January 1672, which set out the arrangements for the conduct of the joint naval campaign against the Dutch. He was a principal architect of the war that killed him, not an opponent of it.

Of course, Sandwich might have dissembled deliberately by telling Evelyn he was against the war; the conflict was unpopular, and Sandwich might have been covering himself in the event of a future parliamentary enquiry, such as that which had followed the previous war. But my inner alarm bell really started to ring when I moved on to research Ossory. In 1680 he was appointed Governor of Tangier, a posting widely regarded as a death sentence. According to Evelyn, Ossory spoke to him privately of his doubts on 26 July, bemoaning the fact that he believed he was being sent out solely so that Charles II could prove to the next Parliament that he, the king, had done all he could to save Tangier by sending out his best and most popular general; in other words, Ossory’s reputation would be destroyed in a mission that could not succeed simply to serve the king’s own cynical political agenda. Still according to Evelyn, it was at a dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall on the same evening that Ossory fell ill with the severe fever, probably typhus, that was to kill him. Although Ossory and Evelyn might well have had the sort of conversation described by the diarist, Evelyn’s recollection of the sequence of events is seriously faulty. The earl had been stricken by the fever on about 18 July, and on the 26th he was in the second day of a delirium that lasted until his death.

So what explains Evelyn’s apparent inventions? Of course, he might simply have got the dates wrong, especially if he was writing up several days of his diary at once; but this seems unlikely in Ossory’s case at least, given the nature of Evelyn’s entries on the days before and after the 26th. But it seems curious that Evelyn should have claimed sole privy knowledge of the last thoughts of two of the most eminent warriors of the age. Throughout history, there are those who have claimed to be the last witnesses to the final hours and thoughts of a great figure, often as a way of emphasising their own importance in the history of their age. (Witness the weight given to the reminiscences of Hitler’s last secretary/bodyguard/etc, and more recently to those of Colonel Gaddafi’s driver.) If Evelyn did invent or exaggerate Sandwich’s and Ossory’s statements, he must surely have done so in the belief that his diary would eventually be published, and that such publication would present him as an important figure who was privy to the innermost thoughts of the great. Which begs an unsettling question – what else in Evelyn, or in many other sources that historians have always accepted as gospel, might be at least ‘economical with the truth’? At least we now know where we stand with Tristan Jones, who brazenly invented vast tracts of his life; or at least, we should do!

A Hope and A Sandwich: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c1660-c1714, Part 2

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Back to post-Olympics reality! As promised, today’s post is the second part of my study of post-1660 warship names, originally intended for publication in an academic journal. I originally thought that this would be the concluding part, but I think the remaining material is too long for just one post, so I’ll postpone the conclusion until next week when I’ll actually be in north Wales on another research trip. However, I’ve also just realised that today, 13 August, marks the first anniversary of this Gentleman and Tarpaulins blog! I can’t really believe it’s been a year…just where did the time go? It would be remiss of me to let the occasion pass without thanking you, my readers, for your support over the past year, and for your stimulating and always greatly appreciated comments. As for future plans… Over the autumn and winter I’ll be building up to the publication of my latest books, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales and the fourth title in the Quinton series, The Lion of Midnight, so there’ll be plenty of posts tied in to them. I have a few ideas for the rest of the summer, notably an account of my sometimes surreal experiences as an officer in the RNR (CCF), but please let me know if there are any topics related to my writing or naval history generally that you’d like me to cover. Also, I’ve been wondering about having the occasional guest blogger; would people welcome this or not? I’d love to have your feedback!

Anyway, on with the matter in hand…

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In 1677 Parliament voted for the funds for a huge new construction programme of thirty ships, intended to eliminate the French navy’s perceived superiority in numbers, and the ships began to be named and launched from the spring of 1678 onwards. The first three names were essentially personal to Charles. Lenox was named after Charles, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, his illegitimate son by the Duchess of Portsmouth and thus by extension probably honours the mother as well, as the names Richmond and Portsmouth were already taken. The idiosyncratic spelling seems to have been Charles’s own, as both the ducal patent and all historical precedents spell the name ‘nn’. (A project has been launched to build a replica of Lenox at Deptford, inspired by the outstanding book on the ship by my good friend Richard Endsor.) The second, Restoration, was launched on 28 May 1678, the day before the eighteenth anniversary of the event her name commemorated. The third was named Hampton Court; arguably an unusual choice as Charles spent little time there, although he and Catherine of Braganza had honeymooned there in 1662. The Captain (July 1678) was presumably named in honour of the Duke of Monmouth, who had been appointed captain-general of the English army in April.

Before the next batch of ships was launched, the ‘Popish Plot’ had erupted. It is possible that Charles responded to this by selecting names that pandered more to Protestant and patriotic sentiment: hence Anne in November 1678, to honour a Protestant and legitimate member of the king’s family, Windsor Castle, after one of the monarchy’s most obvious symbols, and three names that recalled the Elizabethan navy, Eagle, Vanguard and Elizabeth itself. The Hope, launched on 3 March 1679, also recalled the triumph against the Spanish Armada (a galleon of that name had fought in the action), but the timing of the launch suggests that the name might have had a double meaning, possibly to reflect the optimism surrounding the meeting of the first new parliament for eighteen years (it opened on the 6th); this was short-lived, as relations between Charles and this parliament rapidly deteriorated. This might also provide an explanation for the suggestion that the Hope was originally intended to be named Sandwich. The new name, reflecting a very brief moment of optimism in national politics and Charles II’s own thinking, could have been assigned to the ship at short notice, with the original name of Sandwich then being reassigned to one of the hulls that would be launched a few weeks later.

No fewer than seven ships were named in May 1679, the month when Charles’s difficult relationship with the ‘first exclusion parliament’ culminated in its prorogation. One, the Sandwich, recalled an architect of the Restoration who had been killed at the same time of year, seven years before. Grafton was named after another of the king’s illegitimate sons; she was followed in June by Northumberland, named after his brother. Duchess might have been named for the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, so her naming might have been a subtle gesture of defiance against the exclusionists; an alternative candidate would be the Duchess of Portsmouth, which would have been equally provocative. (Of course, it is equally possible that the name simply recognised the generic title.) Kent and Essex seem to be purely geographical names, honouring counties which made particularly substantial contributions to the Royal Navy, and they also revived the names of warships lost earlier in the reign. On the other hand, the name Essex might have had a double meaning which could have been a gesture towards Charles’s opponents – Arthur, Earl of Essex, was a key figure in the newly remodelled Privy Council that was meant to bring about national reconciliation (and his brother was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time), while the navy’s previous Essex had been named after Parliament’s captain-general in the Civil War.

The other ships launched in the summer of 1679 were the Berwick (May) and Stirling Castle (July). These seemingly odd choices, given Charles II’s well-known dislike of Scotland and its environs, might have been a response to the almost exactly contemporary covenanter rebellion that culminated in the battle of Bothwell Brig, i.e. emphasising the strength of the fortresses that faced potential rebels and thus by implication the strength of royal control of Scotland; the name Stirling Castle in particular could be an assertion of royal rule after the defeat of that rebellion, by choosing the name of one of the most obvious symbols of that rule in Scotland.

The two names given in September 1679, Expedition and Bredah, were fairly neutral, although the latter can only be a reference back to the Declaration of Breda in 1660 – a fairly odd name to choose at that point given the suspicion of Charles for failing to implement the terms he had agreed in that document, but with a new parliament due to meet in October (although it was later postponed), one that was again likely to be heavily influenced by urban dissenter opinion, it might have been his way of suggesting that he would now be more inclusive towards dissent, as he had originally promised at Breda.  The Burford, launched in November 1679, reverted to type in the sense that it was named after one of his illegitimate sons – but interestingly, it was not named after the eldest of the brood still not to have a ship named after him, the Duke of Southampton (who actually never received this honour, perhaps suggesting that Charles was never wholly confident of the paternity that he had acknowledged in 1670), but after a mere earl, his son by Nell Gwyn, ‘the Protestant whore’, so perhaps once more this was actually a subtle nod toward Protestant sensibilities. Pendennis was launched on 25 December 1679, shortly after Shaftesbury and the whigs began a campaign of petitioning to demand that the exclusion parliament should be allowed to sit. This name might have been a gesture of defiance by Charles toward his critics – Pendennis Castle was the last garrison in England to hold out for Charles I during the civil war, so the name might reflect a determination to persist against overwhelming odds and regardless of the consequences. When added to Windsor Castle, Stirling Castle and Berwick, there certainly seems to be some sort of running theme of deliberately linking ship names to the great fortresses of the kingdoms, i.e. the strongholds that existed to suppress discontent.

In the spring of 1680 Charles seemed to return to purely geographical names, christening two ships the Exeter and Suffolk. It is difficult to see a political rationale behind these names, but there is less difficulty with the other 1680 launch; in October, the month when parliament was finally due to convene, he named the Albemarle, recollecting another great figure of the restoration. Following the dissolution of the third exclusion parliament in March 1681, Charles could again select ship names that did not pander to or respond to the broader political situation, and which reflected his own aspirations. Thus he named the Ossory after one of his recently deceased close friends, the Duke probably in honour of his brother James, whose place in the succession had now been secured, and the Britannia and Neptune, reflecting the broader concern to assert his sovereignty over the seas that had been apparent since his restoration.

Of course, all of this begs a question – had Charles mapped out a rough, or even a pretty precise, idea of what he was going to call at least some of the thirty ships when the programme commenced, or did he make it up as he went along? Clearly some of the names were responses to events that couldn’t possibly have been envisaged in 1677-8 (Ossory, Coronation) but it’s possible that he decided on others in batches (e.g. a couple of palaces, some fortresses, Sandwich and Albemarle, his children, etc). The problem, of course, is that we are very unlikely ever to turn up any source material to enable us to come up with definitive answers, because the naming process essentially took place in Charles’s head. The lack of evidence in Pepys’s papers suggests that he, and later James II & VII, did not consult Pepys, perhaps the one man whom they might have been expected to consult on such matters.

(To be concluded)

 

“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.