J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

jacobites

Essential Historical Research Skills, Number 714: Red Wine

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Pukka historians will tell you that the really important research skills are things like objectivity, respect for one’s sources, empathy with the people of the past, a strong command of context, open-mindedness, and the ability to avoid sneezing onto priceless fourteenth century manuscripts.

However, none of these are as important as red wine.

Of course, it is usually impossible to consume red wine in repositories, as they often have some piffling jobsworth regulations about not consuming food and drink in proximity to original documents; so red wine should normally only be used as an aid to historical research when working online, preferably at home.

(I’ve worked in one, and only one, repository that was an exception to this rule, other than private houses. Back in the 1980s, when the Naval Historical Library of the Ministry of Defence was housed on an upper floor of the Empress State Building, with splendid views of Chelsea FC’s ground, there was no problem whatsoever with munching one’s packed lunch immediately adjacent to utterly irreplaceable seventeenth and eighteenth century manuscripts. Maybe I should have tried the red wine test then.)

The advantages – and, yes, disadvantages – of red wine to a historian are manifold:

1/ With the first glass, you make connections you would otherwise have missed.

2/ With the second glass, you miss connections you would otherwise have made.

3/ With the third glass, you find yourself at 9.00 on a Friday evening still hunting for additional material for the talk you’re giving the next morning.

4/ Four. FOUR glashesh. Ooh look, dartsh on TV. Time to find shome cheeshe, too. And peanutsh.

5/ Wiv th’ fiv- fiff- fifth glash, you even love David Shtarkey, man. An’ that David Olushoga. An’ Luchy Worshley. I love you all. You are ALL my beshtesht friendsh. Yesh, even you.

6/ With the sixth glass, you’re probably onto a second bottle, and should seek medical help. Either that or move to France, where you’ll be regarded as a lightweight, and it won’t be a Friday evening but early Tuesday lunchtime.

(Some will say that gin, Scotch, or even white wine are equally good with historical research. However, these are the sort of people who’ll also tell you that Chardonnay is absolutely fine with fillet steak, so they can be safely ignored.)

Anyway, at the end of last week, I found myself at the early third glass stage. This was foolish, as I already had more than enough material for the talk I was giving on the following day – which, as it turned out, was to a gratifyingly large audience, standing room only in fact, graced by no fewer than four chains of office (the Welsh love chains of office…) and one MP, the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, no less. My talk was already eclectic enough, too, ranging from Mary Queen of Scots to Dylan Thomas by way of Karl Marx and an unexpectedly itinerant dead pug. But then, the inevitable and foolish consequences of pouring that third glass kicked in.

‘I know’, thought my red-wine-fuelled historical research superhero alter ego, ‘I’ll Google this combination of names.’

I should have known better. The great advantage of Google is that you stumble across all sorts of unlikely stories that you’d never, ever have come across in the old days of trekking down to the local library and thumbing through the Encyclopedia Britannica or Keesing’s Contemporary Archives (anybody else remember that?)

…and that, of course, is also the great disadvantage of Google, namely that you stumble across all sorts of unlikely stories, etc etc, which then set you off on some lengthy and perhaps pointless digression or other, as all the while the red wine is muttering excitedly that this might make a book, or at least an article.

So here’s the story in question. There was a doctor in Carmarthen in the 1770s and 1780s who originally hailed from Northumberland. He must have known Sir John Stepney, one of the most prominent members of the family I’ve been researching for many years, because he gave two of his sons the subsidiary Christian name of Stepney. Sir John served as the British ambassador to Prussia in the early 1780s, and thus knew King Frederick the Great (who opined to Stepney that he didn’t think the newly-independent United States of America would last very long; good call, Fred). Sir John must have had other contacts at the Prussian court, and would probably have known the Crown Prince, who succeeded as King Frederick William II in 1786 – so this connection might explain the otherwise distinctly bizarre career move which saw a Welsh provincial doctor become personal physician to the King of Prussia, the direct ancestor of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

All of that’s interesting enough. (Or at any rate, it’s interesting enough when you’ve got the third glass in your hand.) But the truly mind-boggling, digression-starting, book-proposal-writing, element of all this is that the doctor in question was said to be – wait for it – an illegitimate son of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Now, I happen to know a bit about BPC, and not just because I’ve watched Outlander. Jacobitism has always been a not-so-secret subsidiary interest of mine, and one day, I hope to bring out a novel (or a series) with a slightly offbeat Jacobite theme. I also know that no matter how many glasses of wine you’ve had, there are, let’s say, several substantial implausibilities in a story that has a random Scots lass encountering BPC some time during the 1745 rebellion, then going off to Newcastle, changing her name, and having her baby after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden. Given the enduring romantic appeal of BPC, a story like this isn’t particularly surprising – what is surprising, perhaps, is that there aren’t more of them – but, of course, even if it was true, it would almost certainly be impossible to prove it, unless one could maybe arrange a DNA comparison between a descendant of the doctor and someone descended from the Stuarts. So no, the cork can go back into the bottle, because I can’t see there being a book in this. An article might be a different matter, though!

Oddly, though, the town of Carmarthen (NB not to be confused with Caernarfon, especially if you’re getting married) has some serious form when it comes to mysterious royal connections: it has the tomb of the man said to have killed King Richard III, and the graves of the supposed granddaughters of King George III by his secret marriage to the Quaker Hannah Lightfoot. Oh, and Merlin is meant to have hailed from there, too. So a resident doctor who might have been the son of the Bonnie Prince is small beer, really.

Or even a small red wine.

 

On This Spot, In 1753, Nothing Happened. Or Alternatively, It Did. [Rebooted]

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Ridiculously busy ATM as I enter the home straight with the new Quinton novel, The Devil Upon the Wave, and try to finish off a couple of other commitments ASAP too, so a re-blog this week of a post from the relatively early days of this site, back in January 2013. However, this has regained its contemporary resonance thanks to the current presence on TV of an adaptation of Len Deighton’s alternative history novel, SS-GB…and in an age of ‘alternative facts’, alternative history is arguably more popular, and certainly more pertinent, than ever. Indeed, I really want to have a crack at writing some myself one day, although convincing my agent and publisher is taking a little doing! So let’s go back to those innocent days of January 2013, when Barack Obama was about to be sworn in for his second term…(and there’s a piece of alternative history for my American friends straight away – what if the twenty-second amendment had never been passed?)

***

I’ve just finished reading one of my Christmas presents, C J Sansom’s alternative history novel Dominion. This is set in 1952, but a very different 1952: Lord Halifax, rather than Churchill, becomes Prime Minister in 1940 and sues for peace after Dunkirk, as a result of which Hitler obtains a free hand in Europe while giving Britain similar carte blanche in its Empire, the arrangement which Hitler always said he wanted. So by 1952, Britain is ruled by a vicious right-wing regime headed by Lord Beaverbrook, with Oswald Mosley as Home Secretary and Enoch Powell as India Secretary. (Having pretty much started my research on the 17th century navy thirty-plus years ago by reading Sir Arthur Bryant’s classic Pepys trilogy, I particularly loved Sansom’s throwaway line that the ‘Fascist fellow traveller’ Bryant was now education minister.) Churchill is leading an increasingly widespread and successful armed resistance, while in Berlin, Hitler is dying of Parkinson’s disease, and in Washington, Adlai Stevenson has just become President after twelve years of a Republican, isolationist White House. Sansom’s creation of this alternative world is remarkably impressive, his attention to detail quite extraordinary – for example, as someone who’s spent many hours working at the Institute of Historical Research in London University’s Senate House, I loved the idea of it having been taken over by the German Embassy (ambassador – Erwin Rommel), with Gestapo torture cells in the basement where I used to thumb through the 17th and 18th century editions of the London Gazette. Having said that, I thought that the plot itself was a bit disappointing – a massive and distinctly unlikely coincidence followed by a fairly conventional chase thriller and a somewhat flat ending. Overall, though, I enjoyed it a great deal, principally because of its brilliant depiction of a chillingly plausible alternate reality, and thought I’d use it as a launch pad in this blog for some thoughts about alternative histories and their validity.

Before I do so, however, I want to comment on what is, in some respects, the most remarkable thing about Dominion, namely Sansom’s author’s note. Much of this is taken up by a lengthy, vitriolic and highly personal attack on the Scottish National Party and its leader, Alec Salmond. This seems bizarre on several levels. While the excesses of nationalism certainly form one of the central themes of the book, Scotland plays only a small and tangential part in the plot; while one wonders how on earth Sansom’s publisher let his rant see the light of day, given its likely effect on sales north of the border. (Equating Scottish nationalists, even if only implicitly, with German nationalists wearing SS uniforms and Mosley’s Blackshirts,  is hardly likely to be classed as a PR triumph.) Whether authors should use their notes as bully pulpits in this way is a moot point, of course. Sansom had put across the point that ‘nationalism = bad’ clearly enough in the book, including the odd side-swipe at the SNP, so on one level, spelling it out in such an explicit way in an author’s note as well might be considered excessive, and perhaps even patronising to a readership who are assumed to be too lumpen to pick up on the (already not particularly subtle) anti-nationalism message in the novel itself. Moreover, I don’t recall George Orwell feeling the need to hammer home the message that ‘totalitarianism = bad’ in separate author’s notes tacked on to the ends of 1984 or Animal Farm; his texts alone spelled out the message, in the most powerful manner imaginable. Surely if one wants to get a message across in a novel, the novel itself should do the talking? For what it’s worth, you’ll never get an overt political message in any of my books, certainly not in any of the novels (although I have to admit that I’ve taken a few juicy swipes at Welsh local authorities and politicians of all persuasions in my forthcoming book, Britannia’s Dragon); I might explain the reasons why in a future post!

***

Alternative history has a long and respectable pedigree, its offshoot ‘counterfactual history’ a rather shorter but even more respectable one. The difference between the two is explained concisely by an entry in the much-maligned Wikipedia, but to over-simplify outrageously, historians write counterfactual history, and tend to do so as a fun exercise, while novelists write alternative history, and tend to do so to push deeply serious agendas. Many highly distinguished historians contributed ‘counterfactual’ essays to such books as What If? and Virtual History, both published in 2000, while one of my favourite examples of the genre is the brilliant essay by Geoffrey Parker, one of the historians I respect the most, on what might have happened if the Spanish Armada had won – an alternative history also beloved of novelists, most notably in Keith Roberts’ brilliant Pavane. My first introduction to the genre was reading, as a teenager, Winston Churchill’s famous essay on what might have happened if Lee had won at Gettysburg, which opened my eyes to the fundamental truth that many of the great events of history turn upon the very smallest matters of chance and sheer luck. From time to time over the years, I’d dabble in other examples of the genre. For example, the only Kingsley Amis book I’ve ever read is his relatively little-known alternative history novel, The Alteration, which proceeds from the assumption that Catherine of Aragon gave Henry VIII a son, so the Reformation never happened, so twentieth century Britain was still Catholic. But without the challenge of the Reformation, Catholicism – as in Pavane – has remained repressive and hostile to scientific advance; for example, electricity is banned, but great airships cross the Atlantic thanks to sophisticated use of compressed air. The Alteration – the title is a double meaning, the main plot focusing on a struggle to prevent a boy soprano being castrated to preserve his voice – illustrates an important point about alternative history fiction, which is that it’s really a form of alternative science fiction; the difference being that whereas SF takes its starting point as now, alternative history places its starting point somewhere in the past and projects forward from there. In that sense, it’s essentially a literary version of steampunk!

Moreover, the distinctions between the various genres have always been blurred. It could even be argued that all historical fiction is ‘alternative history’ – no historical novel can ever be 100% ‘accurate’, so it’s bound to be presenting an alternative, at least partly imaginary version of the past. A good example of the blurring might be a book like Saki’s When William Came, published in 1913, which I’ve been reading on my Kindle. At the time of publication, it was a deliberately frightening vision of Britain under the rule of a victorious Kaiser, so essentially a work of ‘science fiction’; now, it reads as an alternative history, a sort of Dominion of its day. As such, it’s an example of one of the most useful and important aspects of alternative history, its ability to get us thinking about uncomfortable truths that might have been swept under the carpet by the actual outcome of events. Dominion is very good at bringing this out, thus placing it squarely in the tradition of other accounts of imagined occupations, such as When William Came, Owen Sheers’ Resistance, the classic 1942 movie Went The Day Well? and one of my favourite cult films, the underrated Devil Ship Pirates. So Sansom’s Britons of 1952 are divided between the resisters, those who wish to stay out of politics, and those who admire Nazi Germany and positively relish the opportunity to give free rein to their anti-Semitism and other prejudices. The experience of occupied France and the Channel Islands suggests that this is how things were bound to have been if Britain had lost the war, but it still makes uncomfortable reading.

Some historians still get very stuffy about alternative and counterfactual history, claiming that anything not firmly grounded on documentary evidence isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Personally, I find this attitude terribly blinkered. Of course, good historical writing has to be grounded in fact, based on careful analysis of reliable sources, but to take imagination out of history is rather like draining the colour from a Brueghel painting. In a nutshell, how can we possibly understand the past properly without trying to reconstruct the alternative futures that people living at a particular time imagined might lie ahead of them, or without attempting to get some sort of understanding of their hopes and fears of those futures? To take just one example, let’s consider an event that’s been used as the basis for more than one alternative history book. Let’s imagine that Bonnie Prince Charlie won in 1745, and what might have followed from his victory. A Catholic restoration, probably; but what else? Purges and retribution from above, collaboration and resistance from below – or tolerance, reconciliation and a golden age, as Sir Charles Petrie’s fanciful alternative history suggested? Perhaps a power struggle between the pragmatic Charles on the one hand and his more rigid father and brother on the other? The arrival of a French army to bolster the insecure Jacobite regime? The end of burgeoning democratic institutions such as Parliament and a free press, perhaps – and what might the impact have been on American colonies still thirty years away from asserting their independence? Would they have become independent at all if there was no Seven Years War between King James III & VIII and his staunch ally Louis XV? Going down this road and trying to construct an image of the sort of state, or states, that the Jacobites might have created in Britain is an important exercise, because it allows us a glimpse into the mental world of the Georgians who were petrified by the prospect of a Jacobite victory; therefore, an imaginary reconstruction of what a Jacobite Britain might have looked like can give us a better understanding of why people opposed it so vehemently. (If anyone wants proof that contemporaries really did speculate about the nature of a Jacobite future, have a look at Daniel Defoe’s And What If the Pretender Should Come?, published in 1713.)

Moreover, a totally rigid adherence to the random survivals that constitute what we call the ‘historical record’ – what Thomas Carlyle, a century and a half ago, rightly called ‘dry as dust’ history – has led many historians to fall into the trap of believing in a teleological vision of the past, which comes to be seen as an inevitable progression towards a particular outcome. The Whig and Marxist interpretations of history are classic examples of this, but so too are some of the more exaggerated manifestations of the doctrine of American Exceptionalism and (here I’ll agree with Sansom, up to a point) some of the ways in which the histories of Scotland, Ireland and Wales have been mangled to serve particular agendas. When writing the ‘medieval’ section of Britannia’s Dragon, for instance, it became clear to me that the traditional picture of poor, weak, divided Wales facing inevitable defeat against the far more powerful English juggernaut is a false construct, created by historians who saw Welsh history exclusively in terms of an unequal relationship between just two clearly defined modern countries, England and Wales, and projected that relationship back into the past. (Not just Welsh historians with chips on their shoulders, either; the idea of the inevitability and rightness of English expansionism still has a powerful influence on English attitudes to history, including a markedly malevolent one on the extreme right.) In fact, the story of Anglo-Welsh relations from about 900 to 1400 needs to be seen in the broader context of the whole Irish Sea, with the complex power balance between the northern Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, the southern one of Deheubarth, England (itself not as monolithic as sometimes assumed), the Dublin Norse, the native Irish, the Manx, the Scots and above all the Norse in the Hebrides, being critical to Welsh prospects of remaining independent, and the Battle of Largs (1263), when the Norse of the Isles were decisively defeated by the Scots, as a crucial factor in indirectly determining the fate of Wales. One of my favourite books of last year, which I mentioned on this blog almost exactly a year ago, was Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms, a brilliant study of some of the lost states of Europe, which took the line that there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about those states’ disappearance and the survival of the ones which we have today, arguing that the obsessive concentration of historians on the development of the surviving modern states alone seriously distorts historical realities.

Of course, there are dangers to alternative history, too. At the more harmless end of the scale, the internet is full of discussion forums, Wikis and so forth, where people with too much time on their hands create elaborate edifices of the imagination; for instance, while researching Britannia’s Dragon I came across a staggeringly detailed account of the ‘Royal Welsh navy’ (yes, complete with aircraft carriers and submarines), the Wales in question having successfully regained its independence under Owain Glyndwr in the fifteenth century. But it’s only a relatively short step from such innocuous pastimes to preferring the alternative history to the real one; witness the ‘Confederate’ mentality which can’t really accept that the South lost the Civil War, or the ‘Braveheart’ school of Scottish history. (OK, another point where I don’t entirely disagree with C J Sansom.) And that, in turn, is only a relatively short step away from the conspiracy theory mentality which holds that what we’re experiencing is the false, alternative history, while the real truth of what happened in key events – JFK, 9/11, etc etc – is being kept from us.

I thought I’d finish with the one and only piece of alternative history I’ve ever written; or at least, written to date, as putting this blog together has whetted my appetite to write more! This was the opening of my essay on ‘James II, William of Orange and the Admirals’, published in By Force or By Default? The Revolution of 1688-9, published in 1989.

Imagine an alternative 5 November 1688. Almost at the moment that the vanguard of William of Orange’s invading army sets foot on the sands of Bridlington Bay, the mastheads of the English fleet are sighted, closing rapidly in line of battle from the south-east. The Dutch fleet, trapped between the enemy and a lee shore, and hampered by the need to defend several hundred transports clustered in the bay, struggles vainly to gain sea room. The battle is short, sharp, and decisive; by nightfall, most of the Dutch transports are ablaze and the shattered remnant of the escorting fleet is heading in disarray for Holland, bearing aboard it a sadder, wiser and disheartened Prince of Orange.

When news of the crushing victory reached Whitehall, James II gave orders for a Te Deum to celebrate the triumph of his fleet and the preservation of his throne. Provincial noblemen returned, dispirited, to their estates, and prepared to draft loyal addresses congratulating the king on his victory; colonels hastily burned incriminating correspondence and ordered their regiments to give three huzzahs for King James and the Prince of Wales; Anglican clerics agonised over drafts of sermons which would try to show that such a clear manifestation of God’s providence was not proof that He was, after all, a Roman Catholic God; and generations of historians yet unborn were condemned to spend their professional lives considering just why James II had such unanimous support from the political nation in 1688.

The Anglo-Dutch Fleet at the Battle of Barfleur/La Hogue 1692

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I’m delighted to be able to start the New Year with a really important guest blog from Frank Fox. Following on from his previous contributions on this site, which provided the most definitive listings of the fleets at the Battle of the Texel/Kijkduin (11/21 August 1673), Frank has now turned his attention to the twin battles of Barfleur and La Hogue in 1692. These were hugely important in both the immediate context of the ‘Nine Years War’ and the wider one of naval history as a whole: Admiral Russell’s victory both prevented probably the most realistic prospect of a full-scale pro-Jacobite invasion, and constituted one of the most spectacular and complete British naval triumphs before the age of Nelson. And yet, as Frank points out, our understanding of which ships actually fought in the battles is remarkably sketchy. That all changes right now, as I hand over to Frank!

(Note: the formatting of the lists below has been tested on two browsers, Chrome and Edge, but I can’t guarantee that they’ll retain the formatting on other platforms, especially mobile ones.)

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Many thanks to David Davies for making his site available.  The series of actions known as the Battle of Barfleur/La Hogue took place in the English Channel on 19-24 May 1692 (Old Style) or 29 May-3 June (New Style) between an outnumbered French fleet under the Comte de Tourville and an Anglo-Dutch force with British admiral Edward Russell in overall command and Philips van Almonde directing the Dutch.  Considering the importance of these events, it is surprising that the makeup of the fleets has been so imperfectly known.  The French battle line, at least, is well recorded and not repeated here – though an accounting of frigates and fireships is still lacking.  But the English and Dutch squadrons in modern printed and online works are chaotically inconsistent.  I have sought to remedy this here as far as possible.

For the Dutch, I have followed (with expanded details) a mostly ignored order of battle found by A L van Schelven in the records of the Admiralty of Amsterdam and published in 1947.  It is dated 17/27 May, when the fleet sailed from St Helens two days before the action.[1]  Modern researcher Carl Stapel found a closely related list in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague dated 16/26 May; it omits one ship through an apparent clerical error and shows a different disposition of frigates which was evidently altered the next day.[2]  Dutch journals mention no other arrivals before the fighting ended.

Van Schelven’s list is best verified from English records.  Extensive correspondence with Russell and Almonde is preserved in the papers of Secretary of State Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham and principal strategic advisor to Queen Mary.  These include many reports of ship movements and several invaluable Dutch fleet lists sent to Russell by Almonde at various times.  Nottingham and the queen also communicated often with officers of the Portsmouth-based Dutch winter guard which supplied eleven vessels to Almonde’s fleet.[3]  The English sources lend strong credence to Van Schelven’s list.

Numerous Dutch ships joined after the fighting ended on 24 May/3 June, and their arrival dates are nearly all recorded in Nottingham’s papers.  Most of these vessels appear on one or another of the printed or online orders of battle, so I list them here showing guns and captains.  As in the order of battle below, the letter before each ship’s name indicates the admiralty to which it belonged:  A for Amsterdam, M for the Maas (Rotterdam), N for the Noorderkwartier (North Holland), Z for Zeeland, and F for Friesland.

Arrived St Helens 24 May/3 June, but only sailed for La Hogue the next day:[4]

Z       Zierikzee                             64           Jan de La Palma

M      Maagd van Dordrecht         60           Matthijs Paradijs

 

Came to Dover 26 May/5 June requesting orders:[5]

N       Wapen van Hoorn             54           Jacob van Veen (joined fleet)

N       Valkenier                           42           Diest Cromhout (sent to North Sea)

N       fireship Brandenburg          ?            Andries Muijsevanger

 

Joined the fleet at Spithead 1/11 June after convoying (with three English ships) 60 merchantmen from Bilbao to Falmouth:[6]        

A       Haarlem                              64           Arnold Manart

A       Ripperda                             50           Herman Lijnslager

 

Joined before 6/16 June, possibly on 1/11 June with the Haarlem and Ripperda as the third

Dutch escort of the returning Bilbao convoy, though evidence is inadequate:[7]

F       Frisia                                    72           Hidde de Vries

 

Joined 6/16 June:[8]

F       Prins Casimir                       72           Anthonij van Lith

F       Stad en Lande                     52           Ross

A       Gaasterland                         50           Jan Middtagten

F       Brack                                   36           ?

Z       fireship Zon                           ?           Arend Vinck

 

For the Dutch squadron listed below, ships are given in normal order from van to rear as shown by Van Schelven and confirmed by Captain Philips Schrijver’s account, which specifically mentions that Vice-Admiral Callenburgh commanded the van division.[9]  The year built (or purchased for some fireships) is given to help distinguish the many Dutch warships with identical or similar names.  Guns and manning  (complements, not men aboard) for major ships are mainly from a list drawn up by Almonde on 8/18 May.[10]  Other data and captains not given by Van Schelven are from various sources.[11]  The abbreviation ‘S-b-N’ means schout-bij-nacht, or rear-admiral.  The Dutch battle-line included twenty-four ‘capital ships’ of 50 guns or more and three heavy frigates of 40-44 guns; eight smaller frigates of 16-38 guns and seven fireships were outside the line.

On the British side, Russell established his initial order of battle on 5/15 May, but issued a slightly updated order on 14/24 May.[12]  Laird Clowes printed the original or a closely related version in 1898 (in reverse order) and Clowes is still followed in some recent sources.[13]  But many ships on his list did not arrive in time for the battle, while others not listed did, and he mostly omitted light frigates and other small warships.  During the twentieth century some researchers and historians offered corrections and additions,[14] but more adjustments and details are still needed.  I have reexamined the Admiralty’s fleet distribution lists for May and June 1692,[15] correspondence and accounts of the participants from many sources,[16] and various ships’ logs.[17]  The result is the list below.

The ships are given as arrayed from van to rear.[18]  Guns and complements are from the Admiralty’s fleet distribution lists,[19] while men aboard are as of 14/24 May as reported by Russell the next day.[20]  Russell’s data are useful in showing the overall manning condition of the fleet, but are not the final figures for some ships because he reluctantly obeyed the Admiralty’s orders to transfer men from over-manned ships to under-manned vessels; the Vanguard, for instance, gained 32 men, making 612, by 16/26 May.[21]  Asterisks indicate captains killed.  The battle-line numbered 58 ships of 44 guns or more including (surprisingly) a fifth-rate.  Outside the line were four more fifth-rates, six sixth-rates, and a hospital ship.  There were 23 fireships on hand for the first day’s fighting, but another joined later.   Incidentally, two late-arriving vessels were nearly in time to find a place on the list below.  The third-rate York reached La Hogue just hours after the fighting ended on 24 May/3 June, and the third-rate Royal Oak came to St Helens the next day.[22] There is also an oddity:  Vice-Admiral Sir Ralph Delavall sowed confusion by specifically naming the fourth-rate Reserve as taking part in his attack at Cherbourg, but this was a misidentification; the ship was then leaving the Thames with orders to blockade Dunkirk.[23]

 

WHITE SQUADRON – DUTCH

 

Van Division, Vice-Admiral Callenburgh

Adm Built    Ship                                 Guns  Comp       Captain

M      1665    Zeven Provinciën                76      400        Evert de Liefde

M      1683    Kapitein Generaal               84      500        S-b-N Philips van der Goes

M      1688    Veluwe [24]                         64      335        Cornelis van Brakel

N       1691    Wapen van Medemblik       50      210        Jan Visscher

N       1690    Noord Holland [24]             68      350        Jacob de Jonge

N       1688    Kasteel van Medemblik      86      500        V-Adm Gerard Callenburgh

M      1691    Ridderschap                        72      375        Johan van Convent

A       1662    Harderwijk                           44      175        Justus van Hoogenhoeck

A       1688    Brandenburg [25]                92      500        Hendrik van Toll

Frigates, not in line

A       1688    Anna [24]                            36      150        Govert van Meppelen

A       1692    Wakende Boij                      26      100        Jan Varckenvisscher

N       1689    Herder                                16         60        Meijndert de Boer

Fireships

M      1692    Fenix or Vogel Fenix           ?         28        Willem Gerritsz. Klein

M      1691    Wijnbergen                          ?         22        Jan Freriks Presser

 

Centre Division, Lieutenant-Admiral Van Almonde

A       1688    Amsterdam [24]                 64      325        Cornelis van der Zaan

A       1683    Prinses Maria                     92      500        S-b-N Gilles Scheij

A       1672    Schattershoef [24]             50      210        Jan Barend van Wassenaar

A       1691    Elswout or Elsterwout        72      375        Louis, Graaf van Nassau

A       1687    Prins                                  92      540        Lt-Adm Philips van Almonde

A       1692    Slot Muijden                       72      375        Gerard van der Dussen

A       1687    Edam                                 40      165        Christiaan Bernhard, Graaf

van Bentheim

N       1682    Westfriesland                     88      475        S-b-N Jan Gerritsz. Muijs

A       1687    Leijden [24]                        64      325        Pieter Klaasz. Decker

Frigates, not in line

A       1677    Raadhuijs van Haarlem      38      150        Hendrik de Veer

A       1692    Batavier                              26      100        Jolle Jolleszoon

A       1675    Bruijnwis                             18         75        Jan, Baron van Nieuland

Fireships

A       1688    Vesuvius                               4         22        Gilles Jansz. Du Pon

A       1688    Strombolij                              6         22        Jan Herman van Troijen

A       1672    Etna or Berg Etna                 6         22        Cornelis Pieter Schuijt

 

Rear Division, Vice-Admiral Van der Putten

A       1688    Vlaardingen                         42      170        Rutger Bucking

M      1666    Gelderland                           64      325        Johan Willem van Rechteren

A       1663    Provincie v. Utrecht [26]      62      325        Abraham Ferdinand van Zijll

Z        1691    Eerste Edele [24]                74      400        Andries de Boer

Z        1688    Koning Willem                     93      525        V-Adm Carel van der Putten

A       1690    Zeelandia                             64      325        Philips Schrijver

Z        1688    Ter Goes [24]                      54      225        Maarten Barentsz. Boom

Z        1682    Zeelandia                            92      500        S-b-N Geleijn Evertsen

Z        1682    Veere [24]                           62      325        Cornelis Mosselman

Frigates, not in line

Z        1689    Zeijst [24]                            30      130        Steven Wiltschut

A       1675    Neptunis                               18         75        Daniel Ronkszen

Fireships

Z        1689    Etna                                      4           22        Samuel Des Herbes

A       1688    Zes Gebroeders [24]             6         22        Simon Jacobs de Jongh

 

RED SQUADRON – BRITISH

 

Van Division, Vice-Admiral Delavall

Rate  Ship                                Guns  Comp  Aboard    Captain

2       St Michael                           90       600      602        Thomas Hopson

3       Lenox                                  70       460      422        John Munden

4       Bonaventure                       48       230      216        John Hubbard

2       Royal Katherine                  82       540      510        Wolfran Cornwall

1       Royal Sovereign               100       815      840        V-Adm Sir Ralph Delavall

2nd Humphrey Sanders

3       Captain                                70       460      396        Daniel Jones

4       Centurion                             48       230      209        Francis Wyvell

3       Burford                                 70       460      422        Thomas Harlow

Fireships

Extravagant [27]                           10         40         41        Fleetwood Emes

Wolf [28]                                         8         45         35        James Greenway

Vulcan                                             8         45         44        Joseph Soames

Hound [28]                                      8         45         43        Thomas Foulis

 

Centre Division, Admiral Russell

3       Elizabeth                              70       460      357        Stafford Fairborne

3       Rupert                                  66       400      252        Basil Beaumont

3       Eagle                                    70       460      390        John Leake

4       Chester                                48       230      172        Thomas Gillam

1       St Andrew                            96       730      730        George Churchill

1       Britannia                            100       780      940        Adm Edward Russell

1st David Mitchell

2nd John Fletcher

1       London                                 96       730      780        Matthew Aylmer

4       Greenwich                            54       280      233        Richard Edwards

3       Restoration                           70       460      380        John Gother

3       Grafton                                 70       460      380        William Bokenham

4       Dragon [29]                          46       220          —       William Vickars

Fireships

Flame                                             8         45         43        James Stewart

Roebuck                                         8         45          —        Francis Manley

Vulture                                            8         45         37        Hovenden Walker

Spy                                                 8         45         41        John Norris

 

Rear Division, Rear-Admiral Shovell

3       Hampton Court                   70       460      434        John Graydon

3       Swiftsure                             70       420      370        Richard Clarke

4       St Albans                            50       280          —       Richard Fitzpatrick

3       Kent                                    70       460      401        John Neville

1       Royal William                    100       780      880        R-Adm Sir Clowdesley Shovell

2nd Thomas Jennings

2       Sandwich                             90       660      606        Anthony Hastings*

4       Oxford                                  54       280      275        James Wishart

3       Cambridge                           70       420      400        Richard Lestock

4       Ruby                                    48       230      200        George Meese

Fireships

Phaeton [30]                                 8         45         40        Robert Hancock

Fox [30]                                        8         45         33        Thomas Killingworth

Strombolo                                     8         45         31        Thomas Urry

Hopewell [30]                               8         40         45        William Jumper

 

 

BLUE SQUADRON – BRITISH

 

Van Division, Rear-Admiral Carter

3       Hope                                     70       460      362        Henry Robinson

4       Deptford                                50       280      240        William Kerr

3       Essex                                    70       460      391        John Bridges (elder)

2       Duke                                     90       660      640        R-Adm Richard Carter*

2nd William Wright

2       Ossory                                  90       660      590        John Tyrrell

4       Woolwich                              54       280      270        Christopher Myngs

3       Suffolk                                  70       460      382        Christopher Billop

4       Crown                                   48       230      220        Thomas Warren

3       Dreadnought                         64       365      309        Thomas Coall

3       Stirling Castle                        70       460      356        Benjamin Walters

4       Tiger Prize [31]                     48       230      168        Robert Sincock

Fireships

Thomas & Elizabeth [32]               10         40         33        Edward Littleton

Vesuvius                                          8         45         43        John Guy

Hunter                                              8         45         36        Thomas Rooke

Hawk                                                8         45          —        William Harman

 

Centre Division, Admiral Ashby

3       Edgar                                   72       445      352        John Torpley

3       Monmouth                            66       460      395        Robert Robinson

2       Duchess                               90       660      680        John Clements

1       Victory                                100       780      767        Adm Sir John Ashby

2nd Edward Stanley

2       Vanguard                              90       660      580        Christopher Mason

5       Adventure                             44       190      145        Thomas Dilkes

3       Warspite                               70       420      340        Caleb Grantham

3       Montagu                               62       355      343        Simon Foulkes

3       Defiance                               64       400      324        Edward Gourney

3       Berwick                                 70       460      381        Henry Martin

Fireships

Speedwell                                      8         45         40        Thomas Symonds

Griffin                                             8         45          —        Robert Partridge

Etna                                               8         45         43        Richard Carverth

Blaze [28]                                      8         45         45        Thomas Heath

 

Rear Division, Vice-Admiral Rooke

3       Lion                                       60       340      249        Robert Wiseman

3       Northumberland                    70       460      410        Andrew Cotton

4       Advice                                   48       230      193        Charles Hawkins

2       Neptune                                90       660      682        V-Adm George Rooke

2nd Thomas Gardner

2       Windsor Castle                     90       660      750        Peregrine Osborne, Earl

of Danby

3       Expedition                            70       460      430        Edward Dover

3       Monck                                  60       340          —       Benjamin Hoskins

3       Resolution                            70       420      289        Edward Good

2       Albemarle                             90       660      655        Sir Francis Wheeler

Fireships

Half Moon [32]                               8         35          —        John Knapp

Owner’s Love                               10         40          —        John Perry

Cadiz Merchant [30]                     12         45          —        Robert Wynn

Lightning                                         8         45          —        Lawrence Keck

 

Light Frigates and Small Warships, not in line

5       Falcon                                  42       180          —        Nathaniel Browne

5       Mary Galley                          34       160          —        Richard Griffith

5       Charles Galley                     32       180          —        Joseph Waters

5       Portsmouth                          32       135          —        John Bridges (younger)

5       Concord hospital [33]          30         45          —        Ralph Crow

6       Sally Rose                           22         80          —        Thomas Pound

6       Greyhound                           16         75          —        William Kiggins

6       Saudadoes                           16         75          —        William Prower

6       Fubbs yacht                          12         40          —        John Guy

6       Salamander bomb                10         35          —        Thomas Pinder

6       Shark brigantine [34]        4+8p         30          —        Jedediah Barker                          

 

 

Notes

 

  1. A L Van Schelven, Philips van Almonde, Admiraal in de Gecombineerde Vloot 1644-1711 (Amsterdam, 1947), 211, citing Adm. XI, 27).
  1. Carl Stapel, unpublished note, citing Nationaal Archieven, Archief Admiraliteitscolleges, Losse Aanwinsten, NA 1.01.47.36 inventaris 6.
  1. Historical Manuscripts Commission [HMC], Report on the Finch Manuscripts, vol. iv, 1692, F Bickley ed. (London, 1965). Many of the originals are in the Leicestershire Record Office [LRO], DG7 NM27, including Dutch fleet lists of 11/21 March, 8/18 May, 14/24 May, and 7/17 June.  Others including Dutch letters from the Portsmouth squadron are in the National Archives at Kew [TNA], SP 42/1 (Secretary of State, State Papers Naval), with ship lists of 6/16 April (pp. 108 and 112) and one from Almonde of 1/11 May (pp. 150 and 154).
  1. Finch iv, 183.
  1. Ibid., 187.
  1. Ibid., 26 (listing these two ships among the winter guard at Portsmouth), 173, 198; TNA ADM 52/123, Pearl master’s log, mentioning two Dutch escorts of 64 and 50 guns.
  1. TNA ADM 51/3932, Pearl captain’s log, reporting three Dutch escorts; Finch iv, 26 (11/21 March) does not list the Frisia in the winter guard, but the original in LRO DG7 NM27 shows that Almonde had no information on ships of Friesland; Finch iii (1957), 265 and 286, suggests that she might indeed have been in the winter guard, as were most of the others listed with her.
  1. Finch iv, 211-12; the printed list of 7/17 June erroneously omits the Haarlem (see above), but she is on the original in LRO DG7 NM27.
  1. Europische Mercurius (Amsterdam), June 1692, 184-5.
  1. LRO DG7 NM27, accompanying a letter from Russell to Nottingham of 9/19 May.
  1. J C de Jonge, Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Zeewezen, vol. iii (Zwolle, 1869), 721-2 and 730-49 (Bijlagen I and VII-XIX); A Vreugdenhil, Ships of the United Netherlands 1648-1702 (Society for Nautical Research, London, 1938); Europische Mercurius, June 1692, 150-196; J Bender, Dutch Warships in the Age of Sail 1600-1714 (Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley, 2014); and valuable unpublished information from researchers Carl Stapel and James Bender.
  1. HMC The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 1692-1693, F J H Skene and E F Taylor eds (London, 1894), 225-9 for the 14 May list, 198-237 for other relevant papers; see also Finch iv, 122.
  1. W Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy, A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, vol. ii (London, 1898), 348-9.
  1. Notably W B Rowbotham, ‘The Devonshire and the Battle of Barfleur’, in The Mariner’s Mirror, vol. 44 (1958), 252; and P Aubrey, The Defeat of James Stuart’s Armada 1692 (Leicester University Press, 1979), 175-180. More recently, researcher Razvan Lipan has posted improvements in the Battle of Barfleur entry in the Romanian Wikipedia (ro.wikipedia.org).
  1. TNA ADM 8/3.
  1. Especially Finch iv, 170-185; R Allyn, A Narrative of the Victory . . . Near La-Hogue (London, 1744); and Europische Mercurius, June 1692, 150-196.
  1. TNA ADM 51 and 52, many volumes.
  1. The order is apparent from several logs and accounts, but particularly obvious from S Martin-Leake, The Life of Sir John Leake, G Callender ed. (Navy Records Society, London, 1920), 48.
  1. TNA ADM 8/3.
  1. House of Lords, 227-9; guns and complements added by the editors were from unreliable sources.
  1. Ibid., 225-6; Aubrey, 84.
  1. Finch iv, 183-4
  1. Ibid., 185; TNA ADM 8/3; Delavall’s account: Allyn, 55; or London Gazette no. 2769, 23-26 May 1692.
  1. From the winter guard at Portsmouth. These are mostly given by Almonde in his list of 11/21 March of ships planned for the main fleet in LRO DG7 NM27 (printed in Finch iv, 26); of these, the Maas was sent home and Almonde omitted the Amsterdam and frigates Anna and Zeijst.
  1. Also called Keurvorst van Brandenburg.
  1. Guns are from 1688; in 1692 all Amsterdam ships of 62-64 guns were assigned 325 men. Captain Van Zijll was the commander in the North Sea and joined the fleet on 15/25 May “with some of that squadron” (Finch iv, 162).  The frigates Harderwijk, Vlaardingen, and Herder plus the fireship Etna (of Zeeland) probably came with him from his command, but the Wapen van Medemblik that arrived about the same time had been intended for the main fleet from the start.
  1. Set afire by a French shot and destroyed at Barfleur 19/29 May; Aubrey, 104; D J Hepper, British Warship Losses in the Age of Sail 1650-1859 (Jean Boudriot Publications, Rotherfield, 1994), 15.
  1. Expended at Cherbourg 22 May/1 June; London Gazette no. 2769, 23 May 1692; Allyn, 56; Aubrey, 114; Hepper, 15.
  1. Station unknown but this division is implied by TNA ADM 51/269, Dragon captain’s log.
  1. Expended unsuccessfully at Barfleur 19/29 May; Aubrey 176-7; Hepper, 15; Allyn, 36.
  1. This division, station unknown; TNA ADM 51/4371, Tiger Prize captain’s log; House of Lords, 227.
  1. Ran ashore and burned at La Hogue 24 May/3 June; Finch iv, 300 and 514; Aubrey, 118-21 and 180; Hepper, 15. The Half Moon was not present at Barfleur 19/29 May.  Late leaving the Thames, she passed through the Downs 21/31 May; TNA ADM 51/3890, Lark captain’s log.
  1. Hospital ships were classed as fifth-rates for officers’ pay scales.
  1. She had 4 carriage guns and 8 ‘pedreroes’, or light swivels; TNA ADM 8/3.

 

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Carl Stapel and Jim Bender for helping with details of the Dutch squadron, Richard Endsor and Sylvia Spalding for photographing documents in the National Archives, and Paul Ambrose of the Leicester Record Office for hunting down many hard-to-find papers.  Finally, I am most grateful to David Davies for his encouragement – and for his indefatigable efforts at getting the pesky columns in these tables to line up!

(Thanks Frank. A nice Speyside this time, I think. – D)

 

 

 

 

Kings on the Way

by

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?

Rules of Succession

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There’s been much spluttering about the announcement of a change to the royal rules of succession, both to allow elder girls to succeed before younger brothers and to end the prohibition on marriage to Catholics. Indeed, it’s been one of those rare cases of equally loud and indignant spluttering from both left and right – the former keen to be rid of the whole circus, the latter outraged at yet more constitutional tinkering (and in the more extreme bunkers of Protestant fundamentalism, opposed to any sign of compromise with what some of them still see as the Romish Whore of Babylon). As usual when a piece of real, complicated history gets into the press, some of the coverage has been simply woeful. For example, I’ve seen plenty of suggestions that our current procedures are all to do with Henry VIII, presumably because he’s the only monarch whom most journalists and members of the public know anything about (if only thanks to the eye-watering inaccuracies and bodice-ripping of The Tudors). In fact, of course, every monarch who wed between Henry’s reign and 1689 was married to at least one Catholic (although admittedly James VI & I’s spouse only converted after marriage), and the tradition of male primacy in succession to the throne went back at least to the civil war between Stephen and Matilda. Then we’ve had the shock horror brigade who’ve trawled back and discovered that if these rules had existed in 1901, the Kaiser would have become King! Gosh, how dreadful; and if I’d been born in 1901, I’d have been my own grandfather. Fewer pundits have gone further back and realised that if the new rules had existed in the past, neither Henry VIII or Charles I would have become King …and even fewer have realised that neither would George III. Would the American colonies have been quite so animated against ‘Her Majesty Queen Augusta I’, 1760-1813, George’s elder sister? I wonder.

Out of personal interest, I once did quite a lot of work on what seemed to me to be a completely neglected ‘succession crisis’ in British history, namely that of the period 1667-72. This was intended to form part of a book which now seems very unlikely ever to see the light of day, so I’m happy to put it into the public domain. If anybody’s particularly interested, get in touch and I can send you a version with footnotes! Here goes…

King Charles II celebrated his fortieth birthday on 29 May 1670, amid the bonfires, bells, salutes and secretive politicking that dominated the visit to Dover of his sister ‘Madame’, Henrietta, duchesse d’Orleans, sister-in-law of King Louis XIV; a visit that culminated in the notorious treaty by which Charles agreed publicly to announce his conversion to Catholicism prior to embarking on an Anglo-French war against the Netherlands. Even without the astonishing political and religious context that surrounded the birthday celebrations, such landmarks are traditionally supposed to encourage ruminations on mortality; and even if Charles’s thoughts had not already turned that way, the shattering news of Madame’s sudden death, which reached the English court in the morning of 22 June, certainly must have done. The loss of Henrietta at the age of only twenty-six, so soon after the joyful family reunion, devastated the king, who took to his bed. But it also threw into sharp relief the potential succession crisis that seemed to lie ahead of the Stuarts. Charles was already, and by some margin, the oldest crowned head of a large European kingdom, having acquired that distinction when his second cousin Frederick III of Denmark-Norway died in February. Louis XIV was thirty-two, the Emperor Leopold thirty, Carlos el Hechtizado, ‘the Bewitched’ – the appallingly disabled King of Spain – only nine; leaving aside a few German or Italian princes of lesser rank, the only monarch anywhere in Europe who was older than Charles was Alexis, Tsar of all the Russias, and he only by fourteen months. Indeed, some of the uncertainties and policy switchbacks in European politics in the period 1667-72 might be explained by the fact that all of the large western powers, with the notable exception of France, had a real or potential ‘succession crisis’ at the time; in addition to the situations in Britain and Spain, until late in 1671 the Danish male line was represented only by the new King Christian V  and his brother, the future husband of Queen Anne, while the Emperor Leopold had no heir at all, and his serious illness early in 1670 threatened the Habsburg dynasty with extinction.

In Britain, he long-term survival prospects of the Stuart family appeared to be grim. Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, had suffered a miscarriage in June 1669 – somewhat surprisingly, as many courtiers had written off her prospects of bearing a child years before. During this period, too, the Duke of York’s health was worse than the king’s: he had an attack of smallpox in November 1667, and in July 1670, barely a month after Henrietta’s death, James contracted what seemed to be consumption and withdrew to Richmond, where his recovery was briefly despaired of. It turned out to be no more than a bad cold, but the fact that some pessimists exaggerated the symptoms demonstrates the intensity of the concerns for the future of the royal family. James’s two eldest sons, the Dukes of Cambridge and Kendal, had died within weeks of each other in 1667. Therefore the next in line to the throne in 1670 was little Prince Edgar, ‘the sole sprig who is at present ready to succeed to the crown of these kingdoms’, as the Venetian ambassador put it, whose name (unique in every dynasty since the conquest) probably symbolised a desire to reassert British sovereignty at sea after the humiliating Dutch attack on the Medway a few weeks before Edgar’s birth. But the survival record of James’s children was appalling, and Edgar, aged three and three-quarters, followed his elder brothers to the grave on 8 June 1671 – almost exactly two months after his mother, who died in cancerous and grossly corpulent agony. James and Anne had two daughters, Mary (aged seven in 1670) and Anne (aged five) but both were in poor health, especially Anne, and none of Charles and James’s five sisters had lived to see their thirtieth birthdays. Another daughter, Katherine, was born in February 1671, but survived only until December. The concern over the security of the line of succession was reflected in the indecent haste with which a second marriage for James was mooted almost immediately after the death of his first duchess.  But if both James and his daughters died before such a marriage came about and produced a son, and assuming that Charles II did not either legitimise his eldest bastard, the Duke of Monmouth, or divorce Catherine of Braganza and remarry – both possibilities that he had plainly ruled out – then the fate of the Stuart dynasty rested with three other branches of the family. There were the two young daughters of Henrietta, who were being brought up as Catholics at the French court and were thus likely to be unacceptable to English sensibilities (indeed, it was their descendants who formed the principal group disinherited by the soon-to-be-repealed Act of Settlement of 1701, and who provide the residual ‘Jacobite’ claim to the throne to this day). Then there were the children of Charles’ and James’ aunt, the ‘Winter Queen’ Elizabeth of Bohemia. The youngest of her children, Sophia, would eventually be nominated as heir by the 1701 Act of Settlement, and from her the present royal family – all 5,000 or so members of it – descends; but in the 1660s and 1670s the senior representative of this line, the Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig, was damned in Charles II’s eyes because of his support for Parliament and overt ambition to obtain the British crowns during the Civil Wars. The third, and by far the most important, of the potential reversionary claimants in the event of a cataclysmic failure of the dynasty was the twenty-year-old son of the Stuart brothers’ other dead sister, Mary, the Princess Royal (1631-60).

William III, Prince of Orange-Nassau, was at once the hope of many in his Dutch homeland, and potentially the saviour of the Stuart bloodline. He was by far the oldest of the surviving grandchildren of the ‘saint and martyr’ Charles I; apart from the sickly and doomed Prince Edgar, he was also that monarch’s only grandson. Moreover, while Stuarts tended to die suddenly and young, the House of Orange generally enjoyed vigorous health and longevity. William’s father was an exception, dying of smallpox at the age of twenty-four, but William III’s two aunts lived to be seventy-one and forty-six, while both his grandfather and four of that grandfather’s siblings lived well past fifty. Even in 1670, it would have been obvious to both William and his two uncles that there was a reasonably good chance of him eventually succeeding to the British thrones. William decided to visit England in the autumn of 1670. His main reason for coming over was to get Charles to pay his mother’s dowry and other debts, totalling 2,797,859 guilders, but he might also have had one eye on his reversionary interest in the British succession. In turn, his uncles may have taken the opportunity to broach to him his potential future role within the Stuart family; when William eventually arrived in England (he reached Whitehall on 1 November), many believed that he had come to find a wife. After his formal entry to the court, William was feted in the City of London, visited Oxford and Cambridge, and attended a military review in Hyde Park before returning to his homeland in February 1671. Charles at least thought of attempting to recruit William to the Anglo-French ‘grand design’, but abandoned the scheme when he found his nephew to be too Dutch and too Protestant, or so he told Louis XIV. Nevertheless, William’s attitude to his uncles, and to the growing threat to the Dutch state, was ambivalent. In January 1672 he wrote to Charles, promising to support him in ‘obtaining from the States whatever he wish’ as long as it was consistent with his loyalty to the republic; unsurprisingly, this letter has caused Dutch historians considerable angst over the years. When the war began in the spring of 1672, William emerged as the heroic defender of his fatherland, and within twenty years he was King of England and Scotland, the victor of the Boyne and the hero of Protestant Ireland. Ironically, his horse’s trip over a molehill ensured that his life was rather shorter than those of his uncles.

Ultimately, therefore, the worries over the succession during the years 1667-72 proved to be academic. Charles lived to be fifty-five, James to be sixty-eight, and both Mary and Anne lived long enough to succeed to the throne – as did William, albeit only by dint of invading England. But it’s too easy to overlook the insecurities and concerns that plagued people in the past simply because we know how things turned out. As William III’s fatal mole proved, something can always stick its head above ground and set history off on an entirely different course; and wouldn’t be deliciously ironic if after all the headlines and the law-passing, William and Kate’s first child turned out to be a boy after all?