J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Hastings

Annus Mirabilis: Or, a Very Good Time for 17th Century Naval History

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This is turning into something of an annus mirabilis for we few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters), who nail our tattered colours to the rickety mast of seventeenth century naval history.

Next month, on 4 July, there’s what promises to be a fascinating day at Hastings under the auspices of the splendid Shipwreck Museum there, devoted to the wreck of the warship Anne. This year is the 325th anniversary of the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, after which the Anne, a third rate and one of the ‘thirty new ships’ built for Charles II between 1677 and 1685, was driven ashore and burned. The wreck survives at Pett Level and is sometimes exposed at exceptionally low tides; I’ve blogged about her, and my visits to her, here and here. There’s a terrific line-up of expert speakers: Ann Coats, Richard Endsor, Peter Marsden and Robert Stone. Unfortunately, the day also features some idiot rambling inanely about Pepys’s Navy, and then reading the account by Frank Fox, avec la participation de Peter Le Fevre and Richard Endsor (as they say in French films), which provides a highly likely identification of the important and enigmatic Normans Bay wreck and which was originally published on this site.

Three weeks later, the National Maritime Museum is staging a major conference on Tudor and Stuart seafaring, which I’ll be going to. It’s a sign of how the study of naval and maritime history has broadened in the last 30 years or so that this includes topics as diverse as shipboard stress aboard early East India company ships, pirate executions, maritime law and state formation, women and the navy in the British civil wars, the cultural politics of early modern sea captains, and 17th century Scottish ship models. (Not a battle to be seen, as I’ve commented previously on this site.) This is a preliminary to the opening in November of a new exhibition about Samuel Pepys, itself a forerunner of the 400th anniversary of the Queen’s House next year and the subsequent opening of the NMM’s new permanent gallery on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The latter will apparently include some of the fantastic art and ship models of the period; if it’s half as good as the Nelson, Navy, Nation gallery that opened a couple of years back, I’ll be installing a camp bed and making it my permanent address.

On 4 and 5 September, at Portsmouth, the Ordnance Society is holding a conference on ‘Guns From the Sea’, although sadly, I won’t be able to get to that one. The programme looks absolutely fascinating, though, and contains a significant amount of seventeenth century interest. For example, there are papers on the ordnance of Louis XIV’s navy, and on some of the finds from the wreck of the London in the Thames estuary. The London, which blew up off Southend on 7 March 1665, was one of the great ships of both the Commonwealth and Restoration navies, and the wreck site has yielded, and continues to yield, a remarkable amount of valuable material. Moreover, its destruction provided me with a crucial scene in the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, although I used a fair amount of dramatic licence in order to get Samuel Pepys to the wreck site not long after the explosion took place!

Outside the realms of naval history, too, these are halcyon days for seventeenth century buffs in the UK. A new National Civil War Centre recently opened in Newark, and I hope to hack up the A1 to investigate it in the not too distant future. So on the back of all these terrific developments for UK-based fans of the seventeenth century, all we need is a major TV series to finally drive those pesky Tudors off our screens and provide us with a Stuart version of Poldark.

Hmm.

As it happens, I can think of a suitable series of books with lots of action and intrigue, with a handsome young hero who takes his shirt off from time to time…

The Return of That Other Guy

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Conference season again. Last week – ‘Statesmen and Seapower’ at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth. This week – Naval Dockyards Society conference at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Next week – hitting my head slowly and repetitively against a wall in yet another attempt to remind myself that agreeing to give papers at two conferences just a week apart is a staggeringly stupid idea. Looking further ahead, though, I’ll also be speaking at a ‘conference by any other name’ in Hastings on 4 July, of which more anon, and will also be off to the big conference on the Tudor and Stuart Age at the National Maritime Museum later in July, albeit this time as a common-or-garden delegate.

A couple of years ago, I posted a delegate’s guide to maritime history conferences, so here’s my summary of the ‘Statesmen and Seapower’ conference using the criteria that I set out there.

  1. Purpose – all boxes ticked and principal criterion met, i.e. ‘academic historical conferences exist solely so that delegates can meet up again with people they met at previous conferences, and to bitch about the people who haven’t turned up to this one’.
  2. The Conference Programme – ‘One of the most abiding laws of conferences is that the programme is never, ever, right.’  Well, this time it was, thanks to the excellent organisation by Duncan Redford and Simon Williams, although it was unfortunate and beyond the organisers’ control that several speakers had to withdraw at the last minute for personal reasons.
  3. The Graveyard Shift – Tell me about it; I was speaking in the last session of the day, when delegates were keen to get to HMS Victory for drinks on the quarterdeck. No pressure on timing at all, then.
  4. Sleep – Less of an issue at this conference than at many I’ve been to in the past, except during the one paper that overran. And overran. And overran some more.
  5. Victuals – Dinner on the lower gun deck of Victory, on mess tables slung in between the cannon. Let’s face it, for an experience like that, it wouldn’t matter if you were eating rancid pigeon burgers – not that the caterers’ splendid fare resembled them in any way.
  6. That Guy – You know the one I mean. He’s the one who always asks a question, whatever the topic is. He usually sits at or near the front. The question will be very, very long, and will often bear no relationship to the topic. Or else it won’t be a question at all, and will be an extremely long-winded anecdote based on the individual’s own experience, which, again, usually has no relevance whatsoever to the topic under discussion. Yes, he was there.
  7. That Other Guy – Yes, so was he. (See the original post.)

My own paper was entitled ‘The British Navy under the Later Stuart Monarchs: Royal Plaything or Instrument of State Policy’. It looked at the role of Charles II and James II in naval affairs, and drew in part on some material I’ve previously published in this blog – notably in my three posts (this one, this one, and this one) on the naming of Stuart warships. I was on a panel with Alan James, who was looking at very similar questions in relation to Louis XIV’s France, and Gijs Rommelse, who examined the use of the navy in the ideology and imagery of Dutch republicanism. By coincidence, these papers dovetailed remarkably well with a couple of those in the previous session: Beatrice Heuser’s on the sixteenth century origins of English naval strategy, which covered aspects of the ‘sovereignty of the sea’ and the importance of the ‘myth’ of the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar that I then continued in my talk, and Benjamin Redding’s on aspects of English and French naval policy from the 1510s to the 1640s, which raised the question of the political importance of ship names that I continued to develop in my paper. I’ve never known such completely coincidental dovetailing to work so well at a conference!

Anyway, I’m looking at a completely different theme on Saturday, at a NDS conference focusing on the royal dockyards during the Napoleonic Wars. I’m talking on ‘The Strange Life and Stranger Death of Milford Dockyard’ – an odd tale of xenophobia and political skullduggery during the brief history of the short-lived predecessor of Pembroke Dockyard, featuring such figures as one of the principal characters from The Madness of King George, Sir William Hamilton, and, yes, Horatio Nelson himself. My paper is also a bit of a ‘detective story’, in which our intrepid hero sets out to discover whether anything actually remains of undoubtedly the least known royal dockyard in the British Isles.

Finally, to Hastings on 4 July, and what promises to be a fascinating day entitled ‘All About the Anne‘ – the wreck of an important Third Rate man-of-war of Charles II’s navy, lost during the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, and the subject of several previous posts (here, here, and here) on this site. This study-day-cum-conference is taking place under the auspices of Hastings’s splendid Shipwreck Museum, and will feature a number of talks about the ship herself and her times. I’ll be speaking on ‘Pepys’ Navy’, and will also be reading Frank Fox’s important study of the ship losses during the battle, which first appeared in this blog and provides an almost certainly definitive identification of the so-called ‘Normans Bay wreck’. So if you fancy a day at the seaside, complete with ice cream, Punch and Judy, and some seventeenth century naval history, then head down to Hastings in July!

 

 

Squelching Back in Time

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A few weeks ago, I blogged about the reappearance of the wreck of the 1678 Third Rate Anne on the beach at Pett Level near Hastings, the first time it’s been exposed for about fifteen years. Last week, I was able to go down to view her myself, and the experience certainly didn’t disappoint. Having covered the history of the ship in some detail in my previous post, I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves – it was a glorious evening for photography, with some outstanding light. But standing inside the hull, effectively ‘aboard’ the only extant British warship from the period I’ve spent over thirty years researching and writing about, was a pretty moving experience. After all, apart from its surviving papers, artworks, a few salvaged guns and various other artefacts, this is essentially all that’s left of the Restoration navy, and certainly the largest survival of it; the sternpiece of the Royal Charles,  now back at the newly reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after its temporary visit to Greenwich last year, is obviously much grander, but somehow, the wreck of the Anne is more evocative, probably because it’s still lapped by the sea.

Apparently rather more of the wreck is exposed this year than during the previous period when it was visible, but the ever-shifting sands are already starting to reclaim it. For example, warship expert Richard Endsor, who was with me (and helped to pull me out of the soft sand when I started to sink!), said that when he was last at the wreck a few weeks ago, more of the stern post was exposed, and that sand was already covering some of the other timbers. However, a dig is scheduled for August; I hope to get down for some of it, and if I do, I’ll be reporting back via this blog and social media. In the meantime, a big thank you to Jacqui Stanford of the excellent little Shipwreck Museum in Hastings, which should be a ‘must’ destination for all with an interest in maritime history!

The wreck of the Anne from the sea wall. Its resemblance to the nearby has probably saved it from much unwanted attention over the years!
The wreck of the Anne from the sea wall. Its resemblance to the nearby rocks has probably saved it from much unwanted attention over the years!
The Anne, looking along the port side towards the bow.
The Anne, looking along the port side towards the bow.
Detail of frames and planking on the port side of the Anne
Detail of frames and planking on the port side of the Anne
A detail on the starboard side of the Anne. Note the wooden treenail or trenel near bottom of photograph.
A detail on the starboard side of the Anne. Note the wooden treenail or trenel near bottom of photograph.
The bow of the Anne.
The bow of the Anne.

The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 1

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In the mid-1670s, [Samuel] Pepys and other members of the administration became increasingly alarmed at the navy’s numerical inferiority to the French and Dutch. In 1665, Charles II’s fleet had contained 102 major ships, compared to 81 Dutch and 36 French; ten years later, the picture had changed alarmingly…[Figures that Pepys presented to Parliament in April 1675 demonstrated that Britain now had 77 ships of 40 guns and upwards, compared with 85 French and 108 Dutch.]…At least twenty new ships of the first to third rates were required, and the number soon rose to thirty. 

At first, it proved impossible to convince Parliament of the extent of the problem and of the need to vote huge sums of money for the building programme necessary to remedy it. MPs were deeply suspicious of what they saw as a crypto-Catholic, Francophile court, and Pepys was shouted down in the parliamentary sessions of 1675. One backbencher protested that ‘ships must have been built of gold at these rates’, and like many critics of defence spending in later years, he grumbled that much of the naval budget was actually being spent on the salaries of bureaucrats. Another warned that they should ‘not provide here such a number of ships, as not to come here again’. However, the year 1676, when Parliament did not sit, saw a series of stunning French naval successes in the Mediterranean, which proved conclusively that Louis’ fleet was not the paper tiger that some MPs had complacently assumed it to be. When Parliament reconvened in February 1677, the mood was decisively different. ‘The king of France’s great fleet is not built to take Vienna’, one MP observed presciently, and on 5 March Parliament voted £600,000 to build one first rate of 1,400 tons, nine second rates of 1,100, and twenty thirds of 900.

That was how, in Pepys’s Navy, I described the genesis of the ‘thirty new ships’ building programme of the 1670s and 1680s. The ships that emerged were iconic in many ways. They included the first British warships to bear the names Britannia and Neptune. Some of them survived for many years: making allowance for the nature of the eighteenth century practice of ‘rebuilding’ ships, which often produced essentially new ships, the Neptune of 1683 was nominally the same ship as the Torbay that fought in Admiral Rodney’s fleet at the battle of the Saintes ninety-nine years later. Several of the ‘thirty ships’ were wrecked in dramatic circumstances, and their wrecks provide some of the most exciting and important dives around the British coast: the Coronation, wrecked off Plymouth in 1691, is the subject of ongoing study, while the Stirling Castle, Restoration and Northumberland, lost on the Goodwin Sands during the Great Storm of 1703, have produced a large number of fascinating artefacts that have enhanced our understanding of the seventeenth century navy.

However, my choice of theme for this blog was determined by the recent ‘reappearance’ of another of the thirty ships, the Anne, built at Chatham by Phineas Pett the younger and launched in 1678. She was a prestigious ship, and in 1687 she was the flagship of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton, Vice-Admiral of England and an illegitimate son of King Charles II, during a cruise in the Mediterranean which included a visit to Malta; Grafton’s flag captain was Cloudesley Shovell, and also aboard the ship was Henry Fitzjames, illegitimate son of King James II and Arabella Churchill (the sister of the future Duke of Marlborough). I described this event in an essay for the Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society, v (2009), a description which inspired Richard Endsor, the leading authority on the design and construction of late-17th century British warships, to paint the Anne lying in Malta’s Grand Harbour:

Grafton’s fleet, comprising the Anne, the brand new fourth rate Sedgemoor, and the ancient 32-gun fifth rate Pearl, had been substantially reinforced for the occasion. The ageing 48-gun fourth rate Hampshire, the Crown, and the Mermaid from the Sallee squadron had arrived in Malta a few days earlier, as had the Isabella Yacht, the duke’s personal despatch- and pleasure boat…Grafton’s arrival in the Grand Harbour was greeted by a salute of at least sixty-one guns, [and] the fleet proceeded to stay at Malta for ten days [which included an interview with the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta]…

Scan_Pic0049

On 30 June 1690 the Anne was part of the combined Anglo-Dutch fleet that fought the French in the Battle of Beachy Head, a controversial action during which the French gained the upper hand. The Anne, commanded by John Tyrrell, was driven ashore at Pett Level near Hastings and burned. However, the lower part of the hull survived in the sand, and parts of it are exposed from time to time. This year, the timbers of the Anne have reappeared for the first time in sixteen years, as this video demonstrates. As Richard Endsor has written,Anne

This year the warship Anne near Pett Level is exposed to a greater extent than has ever been known in living memory. All the sand is removed from the beach leaving the remains some 70cm above clay ground level. At the time of sighting the tide was not particularly deep and the gully in which she lies did not have time to drain properly so that only about half the ship above ground level was visible…The Anne is very exposed and vulnerable and we can only expect her rapid deterioration. It is therefore essential on this once in a lifetime opportunity that the remains be accurately recorded as soon as possible before their destruction. The whole of the bottom of the Anne survives undamaged and because she is in her original, as built condition, probably represents the only [British] seventeenth century warship that can be recorded to demonstrate how they were built. 

Richard’s reconstruction drawing indicates the extent of the surviving remains in relation to the original appearance of the ship.

Anne

A team based at the Shipwreck Museum, Hastings, and led by Jacqui Stanford and Kimberley Monk, is working to record the wreck as thoroughly as possible; updates on progress will be posted in this blog and in my Twitter feed, and I hope to get down to Pett Level myself some time during the next few months to see the Anne for myself. However, a word of caution to anyone thinking of doing the same – the Anne is protected by law, and whilst visitors may view the ship, they may not touch or remove anything from it.

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Next week I’ll be blogging about the exciting project to build a full-sized replica of the first of the ‘thirty ships’, the Lenox. That post, like this one, will have significant input from Richard Endsor – I’m very grateful to Richard for allowing me to quote him at length and to reproduce several of his stunning illustrations.