J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

King Charles II

Art

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Time for some culture, although I can’t help thinking of a quote I first came across when teaching Mussolini’s Italy to schoolchildren some 30 years ago: ‘when I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my gun,’ said, yes, Mussolini’s Minister of Culture. Seriously, though, this is a particularly good time to be a lover of all things seventeenth century. London currently has two superb art exhibitions with a linked theme, Charles I: King and Collector at the Royal Academy, and Charles II: Art and Power at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, and last week, we went to see them both, the former in the morning, the latter in the afternoon. The former is definitely the main event – nothing less than a re-assembling in one building of a substantial part of the great art collection of King Charles I, sold and dispersed after the king’s execution in 1649. To prepare ourselves, we’d dutifully watched the BBC’s excellent documentary, which showed the great artworks being moved from the Louvre and elsewhere, accompanied by insightful commentary from such noted art critics as, umm, Tony Adams. (On the same principle, I look forward to the next Match of the Day carrying Tracey Emin’s views on Jose Mourinho’s deployment of holding midfielders.)

The Royal Academy exhibition contains an outstanding cross-section of Charles I’s taste. There’s the monumental – the nine panels of Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar have a room to themselves, as do four vast Mortlake tapestries, brought over from France. There’s the intimate, including a substantial collection of miniatures. There’s plenty of Renaissance religious art, although sadly, I can’t look at a lot of this genre without being reminded of Allo Allo‘s running gag about ‘The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies’. There’s a substantial amount of Rubens. Above all, though, there are Van Dycks galore, and for me, they were easily worth the ticket cost on their own. Now, I have to declare a particular personal interest in Van Dyck, quite apart from rating him as a pretty decent dauber: he married Mary Ruthven, heiress of the notorious Earls of Gowrie who were the subject of my book Blood of Kings (now out of print, alas), and thanks to their only child Justina, born eight days before her father died, the Stepney baronets of my hometown of Llanelli, whose history I’ve been writing for many years, became the only legitimate descendants of the great artist. And what Van Dycks the exhibition has on display! There’s the famous portrait of Charles I in three positions; the so-called ‘Great Peece’, a truly vast work which turns the minute Charles and Henrietta Maria into giants; and the knockout centrepiece of the exhibition, three of the greatest Van Dycks of all (Charles I at the Hunt, Charles I with M de St Antoine and the Equestrian Portrait of Charles I) assembled in the same space and looking across at each other, something that would never have happened even when the artist was alive. These works were very familiar – for one thing, they’d all ended up at one time or another as the cover art for History textbooks when I was teaching the period to A-level students! But to see them at their full scale, and complimenting each other, was a sensational experience, allowing all sorts of comparisons to be made. For example, as Wendy, the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed, remarked, it’s curious that the king actually looks more powerful and autocratic in what seems to be the most informal of the three settings, ‘Charles I at the Hunt’, than in the two vast equestrian portraits where he’s in full armour.

My personal favourite in the exhibition, though? This one – ‘The Children of Charles II’, partly because of the poignancy of the eventual fates of both several of the children and of their family as a whole during the turmoil that was soon to engulf them, partly because of that dog.

‘Look, this picture is all about me, right? Not these kids. Especially not the one in the red- I mean, what does he think he looks like? And if he sticks his hand over my face again, he’s mincemeat. Literally. Tony Adams can talk about the symbolism of divine right authority all he likes.’

And so, after lunch, a stroll across Green Park in winter sunshine, skirting the crowds outside Buck House (royal standard flying, so HM in residence), and then into the Queen’s Gallery. This is a much smaller space than the Royal Academy, and the exhibition is much more modest in scale and ambition, with only a very few pieces of really great art from the Royal Collection on display. Paradoxically, though, it had rather more of direct interest to me, which can be summed up simply as ‘lots of naval stuff’. Moreover, unlike the RA, the Queen’s Gallery both permits photography and is much less crowded, so it’s possible to get really close to the pictures, take closeups of detail, etc etc. So here, in no particular order, are a few of my own photos of my personal highlights. But don’t take my word for it: if you’re at all able to get to That London, go yourselves!

Charles II, in one of his more modest moments
A detail from a remarkably detailed plan of Tangier under English rule, showing the great breakwater or ‘mole’ built at vast expense to shelter Charles II’s warships
A detail from ‘The Lord Mayor’s Water Procession on the Thames’, 1683, showing the royal family watching from Whitehall Palace
‘Sir Robert Holmes, his bonfire’ of 1666, aka ‘The English Fury’, painted by Willem van de Velde the elder; the event which provides the backdrop to the opening chapters of the sixth Quinton novel, ‘Death’s Bright Angel’

The highlight for me, though, was Antonio Verrio’s staggering The Sea Triumph of Charles II, from the Royal Collection. I talk about this in my new non-fiction book Kings of the Sea:

Verrio…was also responsible for The Sea Triumph of Charles II, in which Charles, attired as a Roman emperor and attended by his fleet, is driven through the waters by Neptune and four sea horses. Victory presents the king with a plumed helmet, while Envy (the Dutch or French, perhaps?) is struck by lightning. A fleet of British warships lies at anchor, while Minerva and Juno look on approvingly. The whole is adorned with the legend ‘imperium oceano famam qui terminet astris’ (‘whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies alone shall bound’). In short, The Sea Triumph was emphatically not a modest and understated piece of domestic art.

I’d seen the Sea Triumph before, in the Pepys exhibition at the National Maritime Museum a couple of years ago, but the NMM didn’t allow photography. Three cheers, then, for the much more enlightened policy of Her Majesty and those responsible for her art collection, which means that I can leave you with what has to be pretty much the most utterly bonkers piece of naval art ever conceived! Enjoy.

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!

The Warship Anne

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This week, I’m delighted to welcome Richard Endsor as my guest blogger! Richard will be known to many of you as the leading authority on the design and construction of seventeenth century British warships. His book The Restoration Warship, focusing on the Third Rate Lenox of 1677, has justly become a classic, and has, indeed, inspired an ongoing campaign to build a modern replica of that great ship at Deptford, on the site of the dockyard where the original was built. He has a new ‘big book’ coming soon, as he explains at the end of this post, but he’s also found the time to produce a new work about the Lenox‘s sister ship Anne, the remains of which, exposed at particularly low tides at Pett Level on the Sussex coast, constitute the largest survival of King Charles II’s navy. I’ve visited the site myself and have blogged about it more than once on this website – have a look here and here. So now, over to Richard to explain more about his new book on the Anne!

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Inspired by David Davies’s recent blog about his new book, Kings of the Sea, I asked him if he would be so kind and gracious enough to allow me to do a similar bit of blatant self-promotion for my own new book about the seventeenth century navy. Although we have long been friends with a similar interest, we are in no way rivals. He will, in his new book, brilliantly grasp the overall view of the Navy as if he were himself, a long serving Lord of the Admiralty. [Note: I’ve paid him absolutely nothing for this bit, honestly – D] I on the other hand, am down in the dirty dockyard worrying about scarphing of futtocks and how ships were built. Our previous non-fiction works, Pepys’s Navy and Restoration Warship, which came out at about the same time a few years ago, complemented each other.

My new book, The Warship Anne, will similarly complement Kings of the Sea. Work started on it a couple of months after a conference “All about the Anne” was held in July last year at St Clement’s Church, Hastings. Needless to say, David Davies attended and was a sparkling speaker at the event. [Nor for this bit – D] The Warship Anne book is 160 pages long and 250mm square, or nearly 10 inches in old fogies’ terms. It contains about images 150 images, all in full colour of which about 100 were created by me.  I completed the book in only nine months and my publisher, Bloomsbury, with whom it has been such a pleasure to work with, reckon they will have it on the bookstands by 25 February next year. Please don’t gasp in admiration at this remarkable productivity as I have been researching and painting the Anne over a period of some 25 years. I am involved in the Anne as the technical historian for the Warship Anne Trust which owns her, a subsidiary of the Nautical Museum’s Trust. The Trust also runs the Shipwreck Museum in Hastings. The book was written to publicise the surviving remains of the ship as widely as possible. I am so grateful to Bloomsbury who have helped a great deal by keeping the retail price down to only £25 a copy.

The Anne is sometimes visible at low tide at Pett Level, near Hastings and is one of the most important shipwrecks along the southern coast of England. The whole of the lower hull survives intact, as shown in the second image, and is the most substantial known remaining shipwreck from the Navy of Charles II and Samuel Pepys. She was lost in 1690 after the Battle of Beachy Head, while defending the country from invasion. Sadly, her remains and the men who died aboard her are now largely forgotten. The battle prevented a French invasion which, had it been successful, would have dramatically and permanently changed English and European history.  The exiled Catholic King James II would have been restored to the throne, his Catholic faith almost certainly imposed and the country dominated by the French.

Although the importance of Beachy Head ranks alongside the Armada Campaign and the Battle of Trafalgar, it was not a glorious victory to celebrate and be remembered. In fact the outnumbered English and Dutch allies were forced into ignominious retreat during which the dismasted Anne was run ashore between Rye and Hastings.  She became the only English loss when she was burnt to prevent capture.

My book follows the history of the Anne in chronological order. The first chapter deals with the events that led up to her building in 1678 as part of a new fleet of 30 ships. A fleet that would see the start of the British Navy’s domination the world’s oceans until the end of the days of sail. The ships were built a few years after the end of the third Dutch war. A war that was pursued by King Charles after the Dutch made their famous raid on Chatham dockyard at the end of the second Dutch war. The Dutch raid on Chatham followed the less famous English attack on the Dutch merchant fleet in the Vlie, known as Holmes’s bonfire. If you’re Dutch, it might be best if you skip the rest of this chapter as I found, to my surprise, that the damage done by Holmes’s bonfire was much greater than the damage done by the Dutch raid on Chatham. Not only that, but it caused the enraged Charles II to join the French and pursue the third Dutch war to the ruin of the Dutch economy. I reckon the Chatham raid was the Dutch ‘Pearl Harbor’ and it turned out to be as much a disaster for them as it was for the Japanese. A controversial view I know, but I examined the losses in terms of the well documented value of ships, something which appears not to have been done before.

In the second chapter, Phineas Pett II who built the Anne, offers himself as a character whom a fiction author would have difficulty inventing. [We’ll see! – D] A likeable rogue who lets his perceived success go to his head to the annoyance of all those about him: except King Charles, with whom he has much in common. He receives an amusing come-uppance came at the hands of Mrs Elizabeth Brooker to whom his wife owed money. Just as interesting is the building of the Anne. The delays and difficulty Pett had in finding keel pieces were found in the extensive historic record as were many, many other details of the ship’s construction. The most rewarding discovery for me, was recently finding and being able to interpret the actual recorded lines of a sister ship of the Anne, built by Pett to the same draught. From them a reconstructed draught of the Anne was made, which is of course included in the book.  Also printed across two pages is an image of the contemporary model of another sister ship, probably the Elizabeth. The image is photographic but all the distortions of perspective have been removed so that it is a true draught. Also included are the ship’s recorded hull lines traced from the models frames. The book also includes the complete draughts of another of the 30 ships made by Thomas Fagge in about 1680.

Chapter three and four takes the reader through the history of the Anne up until 1688. After launch, she and all the other new ships suffered from decay and repairs were made led by a commission under Samuel Pepys. There followed a voyage in 1687 when she acted as the flagship of a small fleet taking a German princess to Lisbon to marry the King of Portugal. From there she went on into the Mediterranean to confirm peace treaties with the Barbary States and negotiate the release of slaves. With the serious business finished, she visited the Grand Harbour, Malta, a view of which is shown on the book cover painting. During her voyage all sorts of stories emerge: King James’s fascination with Anne’s troublesome experimental pumps, special moveable steps made for the queen to leave Anne with dignity, John Shaw from the Pearl being tried aboard for murder, and a girl slave named Sarah Hawkins freed and her name entered into the Anne’s pay book. The most significant series of events for the ship was the continuing failure of her rotten masts and rigging. Some of the most important ropes stretched and became an inch thinner in circumference. The tops of the masts split for which special iron hoops had to be made to strengthen them. Pepys was ultimately responsible as his commission had supposedly repaired the ship. It resulted in a bitter dispute between him and Cloudesley Shovel, the Anne’s captain, which reveals how devious Pepys could be. He set up his own enquiry, which unsurprisingly found that no ship could be better fitted out.

The following chapter, chapter five, concerns the Battle of Beachy Head. It is painful to read of the damage inflicted on both the French and English ships near the head of the Blue squadron where the Anne was stationed.  Exposed and outnumbered, she was gradually shot to pieces until her masts were lost. Twenty nine men were killed while awful wounds were inflicted on 41 others. Even after all this time, some of the sadness suffered by the men’s families can still be felt. Barbra Cunningham from Jarrow was pregnant when her husband, Thomas, joined the Anne as an Able Seaman. He was killed in the battle before Barbra gave birth. Barbra named her baby daughter Thomasin, in honour of her dead father.

I was lucky in that so much documentation remains concerning the guns of the Anne. Magnificent brass guns were given to her when she went to the Mediterranean with a reduced armament of 62 guns. The 70 iron guns used at Beachy Head are also recorded and I have produced many drawings showing them and their gun carriages, as well as drawings showing where the guns were mounted. Two guns survive today that probably served aboard her.

Finally, the last chapter deals with the Anne today, the archaeology and the hopes for preserving her. I also cover the extent of her remains and ownership by the Warship Anne Trust. Lengthy appendices give details of all the timbers used in ships of her type, together with the transcription of a contract for building a similar ship.

With The Warship Anne book completed, I have returned to my long term project. This is The Master Shipwright’s Secrets, a work dealing with the practices used by the master shipwrights when designing ships. The book is very nearly finished and with any luck, will also be out next year.

The Real Gentlemen Captains, Redux, Part I

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In the lead-up to my appearance on 13 March at Weymouth Leviathan, Britain’s first maritime literary festival, I thought I’d reblog some of my very earliest posts on this site, from November 2011, about some of the characters who will be making appearances during my talk. Here’s the first of them!

People often ask me to what extent the characters in the Quinton Journals, especially Matthew himself, are based on real people. I thought I’d use my next few blog posts to introduce some of the real-life individuals whose careers in Charles II’s navy provided the inspiration for Matthew and some of his adventures; and yes, occasionally the lives of these officers provide a few clues to some of the story lines in future books of the series! In future blogs I’ll also go on to detail some of the ‘tarpaulin’ officers who provided the inspiration for the character and career of Kit Farrell.

Captain Francis Digby – Probably born in about 1645, he was the second son of George Digby, second Earl of Bristol, one of Charles I’s most important (if catastrophic) advisors during the Civil War. He went to sea just after the Restoration, aged about fifteen, and fought at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665 as a volunteer with Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red Squadron. In March 1666 he became lieutenant of the flagship Royal Charles, and his good service in that role during the Four Days Battle at the beginning of June led to his promotion to captain of the Fourth Rate frigate Jersey. His bravery is indicated by the fact that when the Jersey went in for repair after the St James’s day fight, Digby asked permission to go back to sea on another ship as a volunteer (a request rejected by the admiral, the grumpy old Duke of Albemarle). In 1667 he commanded the frigate Greenwich, which seems to have been given to him by King Charles II principally as a means of trying to restore the Digby family fortune, which had been ruined by the civil war. In 1668-9 he commanded the Third Rate Mountague in the Mediterranean. Digby’s manuscript journal for these commands, preserved at the British Library, reveals that despite his aristocratic background, he gradually became a highly competent seaman; on one occasion only his quick thinking prevented the fleet being wrecked on the North African coast.

Digby spent March and April 1672 in France, ‘fine tuning’ the naval agreement by which a combined Anglo-French fleet would attack the Dutch to fulfil the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover (1670). Digby met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and during the next few days had several meetings with the king’s chief minister, Colbert. Not surprisingly the French rejected out of hand Digby’s suggestion that their captains and ships should have English commissions and colours, on the grounds that ‘his Christian Majesty never could suffer his captains to take commissions but from himself’. Despite this and some other disagreements, Digby’s negotiations were complete by 12 March. After leaving Paris he undertook a tour of inspection to Brest and La Rochelle before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry. Digby was apparently somewhat disappointed by this, believing that he was already qualified to be a flag officer; indeed, if he had lived there is little doubt that he would have been an admiral before the end of the third Anglo-Dutch war, as several men junior to him were promoted to such rank during it. But on 28 May 1672 the Dutch under Michiel De Ruyter launched a surprise pre-emptive attack on the Anglo-French fleet as it lay in Solebay. The Henry was in the admiral’s division of the Blue Squadron, which bore the brunt of the fighting; the flagship Royal James was burned by a fireship and her admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, killed. The Henry had the next highest number of casualties in the squadron, with 49 killed. Francis Digby was one of them. He was buried at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, the mausoleum of the Russell family, Earls and later Dukes of Bedford; his mother was a daughter of the fourth Earl.

Digby was one of the many suitors of Frances Stuart, the model for the original image of ‘Britannia’ and later the Duchess of Richmond. Digby’s pursuit of her, like King Charles’s own, proved to be hopeless. He was said to have been driven to distraction by her ‘cruelty’, and after his death at Solebay Dryden wrote ‘Farewell, Fair Armida’, a poignant epitaph to unrequited love:

Farewell, fair Armida, my joy and my grief!
In vain I have loved you, and hope no relief;
Undone by your virtue, too strict and severe,
Your eyes gave me love, and you gave me despair:
Now called by my honour, I seek with content
The fate which in pity you would not prevent:
To languish in love were to find, by delay,
A death that’s more welcome the speediest way.
On seas and in battles, in bullets and fire,
The danger is less than in hopeless desire;
My death’s wound you give me, though far off I bear
My fall from your sight—not to cost you a tear:
But if the kind flood on a wave should convey,
And under your window my body should lay,
The wound on my breast when you happen to see,
You’ll say with a sigh—it was given by me.

Highways and Byways of the Seventeenth Century: the Prince of Transylvania

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Time for another in my (very) occasional series of oddities and little-known tales that I’ve stumbled across during the course of my research. Actually, though, this was one that I came across during my teaching career, my ‘day job’ for thirty or so years. Back in 1987, I took up a new post at Bedford Modern School, and was casting around for a quick way of teaching some very bright sixth formers about the perils and pitfalls of primary sources. Fortuitously, the History department possessed a new-fangled piece of high technology called a ‘VHS recorder’, and just a few months after I started at the school, the BBC broadcast a programme which fitted my bill perfectly, so I recorded it and then used it at the beginning of the A-level course for many years. In those days, the historical documentary series Timewatch didn’t present hour long programmes on a single theme, as it does today. Instead, it covered three different stories within its hour, a format that made it much easier for it to present quirky and lesser-known recesses of history; arguably, the tendency towards ‘big’ stories suitable for the longer slot (and, indeed, for the themed series of three one-hour documentaries that now seem to be in vogue) means that the history which makes it onto our TV screens these days is much narrower in focus, and tends to recycle the same old supposedly ‘important’ themes. For example, even leaving aside such obvious, hackneyed old staples as the Tudors and the Nazis, Lucy Worsley’s recent series on the Romanovs was, by my reckoning, at least the third major series on the history of Russia on mainstream British TV during the last fifteen years or so. Within that same period, how many series have there been on the histories of, say, China, Japan, Brazil, and even India?

But enough of the rant, as that’s not the point I’m making here. The particular programme that I’m talking about included a twenty-minute tale narrated by Gabriel Ronay, a journalist and freelance historian. This began in October 1661, with the burial in Rochester Cathedral of one ‘Cossuma Albertus’, a ‘Prince of Transylvania’, who had been brutally murdered on the main coast road at Gad’s Hill, of Shakespearean fame, a notorious haunt of highwaymen and brigands. The Prince, it seemed, had been received at the court of the recently restored Charles II, where he was treated with honour. A contemporary account of the murder told a shocking tale:

Cossuma Albertus, a Prince of Transylvania, in the dominions of the King of Poland, being worsted by the German forces, and compelled to seek for relief came to our gracious King Charles II. for succour, from whom it is said he found a kind reception and a sufficient maintenance.

On the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 15, 1661, this Prince Cossuma was approaching Rochester in his chariot, attended by his coachman and footboy, when within a mile of Strood…the vehicle stuck fast in the mire; whereupon the Prince resolved to sleep in the coach, pulling off his coat and wrapping it about him to keep himself warm. Being fast asleep, his coachman, Isaac Jacob, a Jew, about midnight takes the Prince’s hanger from under his head, and stabs him to the heart; and calling to his aid his companion, whose name was Casimirus Karsagi, they both completed the tragedy by dragging him out of the carriage, cutting off his head and throwing the mutilated remains into a ditch near at hand. The Prince was dressed in scarlet breeches, his stockings were laced with gold lace, with pearl-colour silk hose under them. The two men having possessed themselves of a large sum of money which the Prince had about with me, drawing a piece of timber, that I am confident one man could easily have carried upon his back. I made the horses be taken away, and a man or two to take the lumber away with their hands.

The burial entry for the 'Prince' in the Rochester Cathedral register
The burial entry for the ‘Prince’ in the Rochester Cathedral register

But Ronay then began to unpick the story in a way that brought home to my students (I hope!) the dangers of relying on single interpretations of events, and the need constantly to interrogate one’s sources. For instance, a copy of one of the pamphlets giving a sensationalist account of the murder contained a contemporary, handwritten marginal note, to the effect ”tis said he was a cheat, and no prince’. Other sources, filmed in such varied locations as the round reading room of the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane and the George in Southwark, the most authentic surviving seventeenth-century hostelry in London, began to build up a very different story. In Charles II’s day, of course, Transylvania didn’t have the vampiric connotations it would later acquire, thanks to the likes of Bram Stoker and Christopher Lee. Instead, it had an overwhelmingly positive image: the Transylvanians were Protestants, holding the borders against both the Ottomans and the Catholic Habsburgs, and their ruler Bethlen Gabor had been one of the great Protestant heroes of the Thirty Years War. But the Transylvanians had been defeated, and many of them had been forced into exile, where they had become objects of sympathy – and of charity, too.

Rochester Cathedral
Rochester Cathedral, with the River Medway and Chatham Dockyard beyond

And there was the rub. ‘Cossuma Albertus’ wasn’t a prince at all, and wasn’t Transylvanian. His first name is probably a phonetic misspelling of ‘Casimir’, and he was almost certainly an impoverished Polish minor nobleman, who had adopted his cover story in order to con the gullible at Charles II’s court – including the King himself. There were also suggestions that he had another income stream as a French spy, no less, and was in the Rochester area to gather intelligence about the warships at Chatham dockyard. The story that he had been slaughtered at Gad’s Hill by his own coachmen unravelled, too; the ‘coachmen’ were his accomplices in the scam, and the murder seems to have been the result of a falling out over the proceeds. The killers were subsequently hanged at Maidstone. Ronay’s account ended with film of Rochester Cathedral, and the words of the published account of ‘the Prince’s’ burial:

His body being brought to the parish of Strood, was accompanied from thence to the West door of the Cathedral Church of Rochester by the Prebendaries of the said church in their formalities, with the gentry and commonality of the said city and places adjacent, with torches before them. Near the cathedral they were met by the choir, who sung Te Deum before them; when divine service was ended, the choir went before the body to the grave (which was made in the body of the church) singing Nunc Dimittis. Thousands of people flockt to this cathedral, amongst whom many gave large commendations of the Dean and Chapter, who bestowed so honorable an interment on a stranger at their own proper costs and charges.

And there he lies to this day: a conman who gulled the King of England, the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral, and, very nearly, the historical record. But not quite.

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!