J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

King Charles II

Richard III, Game of Thrones, and Invading France

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Pretty much everybody else on the interweb-thingy has had their fourpenn’orth about last week’s reburial of King Richard III, and I suppose it was only fitting that the events divided opinion just as sharply as the Marmite Monarch himself – depending on your point of view and which bloggers and tweeters you read, either a dignified and appropriate paying of respects or a ludicrous and unjustifiably expensive pantomime (accompanying those other ongoing panto spats, namely ‘He killed his nephews!”Oh no he didn’t!’ and ‘It’s not him at all!”Oh yes it is!’). I’m not going to get involved in any of that, calling upon the historian’s ancient and infallible get-out clause of ‘it’s not my period’, but I thought I’d pick up on just one element that some of those tuning in to the Dead Dick show might have thought a bit odd: namely, the inclusion of ‘King of France’ among his titles, and the appearance of the French royal arms on his new tomb.

The reason for this, of course, can be found in the causes of ‘the Hundred Years War’, which ended just a few months after Richard’s birth. Philip IV, King of France, who reigned from 1285 to 1314, had three sons, and might have gone to his grave assuming that the royal House of Capet’s succession to the throne was secure. But each of the three succeeded in turn and did not reign for very long: Louis X from 1314 to 1316, Philip V from 1316 to 1322, and Charles IV from 1322 to 1328. None of the brothers fathered a son. In 1316, France adopted the Salic Law, specifying that the throne could pass only to males and only through male lines. This barred from the succession the sister of the three short-lived brothers, namely Isabella, the Queen of King Edward II of England. On Charles IV’s death, therefore, the throne of France passed to the brothers’ first cousin, Philip, Count of Valois, who thus established the new royal dynasty of that name. Isabella refused to accept this and asserted her right in the name of her son, the new King Edward III. Some ten years later, this claim provided the pretext for the outbreak of the war between England and France. From then on, Kings of England also included ‘King of France’ among their titles, and the Fleur-de-Lis of France were quartered with the three lions of England on the royal standard.

Royal standard of later medieval kings of England
Royal standard of later medieval kings of England

(Incidentally, the reigns of the last Capet kings, and the subsequent clash of claims to the throne of France, inspired a series of historical novels, The Accursed Kings, by the French author Maurice Druon. These were read in turn by an American novelist, who took elements of Druon’s stories, mixed in ingredients from England’s Wars of the Roses, added extra dragons, and came up with a moderately successful series of his own, now best known by the title of the first book, Game of Thrones.)

The English monarch’s claim to the French throne remained a live political issue throughout the long duration of the wars, providing, for instance, the theoretical justification for Henry V’s Agincourt campaign (Shakespeare gave the Archbishop of Canterbury a very long and convoluted speech explaining the Salic Law in Act I Scene II of Henry V, which must have had the Globe audience snoring en masse in the aisles). But after the final English defeat at the battle of Castillon in 1453, the claim became increasingly academic, if not somewhat ludicrous, even though, until 1558, England still possessed a tiny foothold on French soil (the Pale of Calais). English Kings, notably Henry VIII, still went campaigning in France from time to time, but not even Bluff King Hal ever seriously expected to conquer the entire country and become its king. Yet his successors maintained the theoretical claim, counting King of France as one of their titles, until 1802, when it was abandoned in the Treaty of Amiens – ironically, at a time when France had no King, but was under the rule of First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte.

During what really is my period, namely the seventeenth century, the claim to the French crown led to all sorts of oddities and logical nonsenses. For example, both Charles II and James II were exiled in the land of, and directly subsidised by, King Louis XIV, the man whose throne they claimed as their own. And for a brief period just after the Restoration, it seems as though Charles II made at least a half hearted attempt to assert his rights as ‘King of France’. The title given to General George Monck, the man who restored him to the throne, was Duke of Albemarle – but Aumale, from which the name was taken, was in Normandy. (And although the claim to the French throne was abandoned in 1802, the claim of English monarchs to be the Dukes of Normandy survives to this day, notably in the Channel Islands where Queen Elizabeth II is toasted as le duc.) The claim to the French throne is also the only possible justification for some dubious legal chicanery in naval warfare, as I noted in Pepys’s Navy:

Meanwhile, in a breathtaking reassertion of claims to sovereignty over large parts of France that would not have displeased his predecessor King Henry V, James’s patent of appointment [as Lord High Admiral of England], ratified on 29 January 1661, also named him as Lord High Admiral of Normandy, Calais, Gascony and Aquitaine, and a further patent of 20 February 1662 added Dunkirk, barely nine months before Charles II (whose titles still included ‘King of France’, the legal basis for James’s appointments) sold the town to Louis XIV. This was not just quaint legalism, nor nostalgia for lost glories. When hostilities with the Dutch loomed and eventually broke out openly in 1664-5, James was able to use his splendid medieval titles to issue letters of marque and reprisal to local privateers from Dunkirk and Honfleur, a strategically astute act which threatened any Dutch shipping that attempted to run up or down the English Channel by hugging the neutral French coast.

The claim to the French throne may have been abandoned in 1802, but when I was at Oxford, the university possessed an Invade and Conquer France Society. (From memory, though, the ‘invasion’ never actually got further than the wine section of a hypermarket in Boulogne.) In 1982, at the height of the Cold War and in the immediate aftermath of the Falklands War, the society’s chairman wrote to Foreign Secretary Francis Pym to assert that France was the real national enemy, and that British foreign policy should be adjusted accordingly. ‘Due to other preoccupations’, wrote the suave and deadpan Pym, ‘the repossession of Normandy, Aquitaine, Maine, Touraine, Anjou etc may have slipped a little in the table of British foreign policy objectives over the last 600 years.’ Richard III, King of England and France, would have been appalled by such out-and-out defeatism.

 

Highways and Byways of the 17th Century: the ‘Royal Escape’

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There was quite a big response to last week’s post on King Charles I’s possible illegitimate daughter, Joanna Bridges, so I thought I’d follow it up by instituting a new occasional series, ‘Highways and Byways of the 17th Century’, covering some of the odd or lesser known stories that I’ve come across during over thirty years’ research into, and teaching of, this endlessly fascinating period. This will complement my other occasional series, ‘Dead Admirals Society’, which provides pictures and descriptions of various interesting naval graves and memorials; I’ll try to add a new post in that series within the next week or two.

For this week’s post, I’ve chosen a footnote in one of the best known of all the stories in 17th century British history – the escape of King Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. By far the best known element of this is the legend of the ‘Royal Oak’ at Boscobel House, where the King hid while Parliamentarian patrols passed below. Other aspects of the story are almost equally well known, such as the very tall and swarthy Charles disguising himself as a woman at one point. But equally important to the King’s safe departure into exile was the ship that eventually carried him across the Channel. On 15 October, after taking a tortuous and often fraught route across southern England, Charles reached the coast at Brighton. The ship chosen to receive him was the collier Surprise, about 34 tons, 42 feet long and 30 feet broad. Her captain and owner, Nicholas Tattersell or Tattersall, had already agreed to take an unnamed passenger and his attendants across to France, but when he met the party and recognised the King, he was furious at being exposed to such danger. Delicate negotiation followed, but Tattersell eventually agreed to make the voyage in return for a further £200. The Surprise duly crossed the Channel, and on 16 October, Charles landed at Fecamp.

The Royal Escape, by Van de Velde the Younger
The Royal Escape, by Van de Velde the Younger

When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles promptly bought the vessel from Tattersell and renamed her the Royal Escape. The King had her moored in the Thames off Whitehall Palace, and showed her off to important visitors. Perhaps she was also a reminder of the potential insecurity of his position, or of God’s providence in preserving his life (or both).  The Royal Escape was put into commission between July 1672 and October 1674 under Captain Augustus Birtch, before returning to her moorings in the Thames, eventually ending up in Deptford Dockyard. She long survived the King who owed so much to her, and was nominally rebuilt at Deptford in 1714. This Royal Escape continued to serve as a stores vessel at Deptford Dockyard until broken up in 1750, by which time a lighter in the same yard had taken the name. This, in turn, was replaced by a new vessel built in 1792 to exactly the same dimensions, which survived until 1877 – so in one very tenuous sense, the Royal Escape continued to be a part of the Royal Navy until Winston Churchill, the 50th anniversary of whose death takes place this week, was three years old!

As for Nicholas Tattersell, Charles II treated him with considerable generosity. He commissioned him captain of the frigate Sorlings on 25 July 1660 and of the powerful Third Rate man-of-war Monck on 20 April 1661, in which capacity he served until 12 February 1663. But he then returned to his old life, albeit cushioned by the security of a £100 annuity for life, and by 1669 was skipper of the ketch Happy Entrance, trading between Sussex and London. He served as High Constable of Brighton in the following year, becoming a particularly vicious persecutor of dissenters in that role. He later bought the Old Ship Inn in the town, and died on 26 July 1674, probably aged 59. His tombstone in St Nicholas Church, Brighton, states that ‘he preserved the Church, the Crown, and the Nation’. His son continued to receive the pension from the crown until after the Glorious Revolution.

Disorderly Houses

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…Or, The Very Long History of British Parliamentarians throwing their toys out of the pram over foreign policy. 

The government’s defeat over its proposed intervention in Syria had political journalists scratching their heads to think of past precedents. Those with GCSE History managed to crawl back as far as Suez, 1956, and Norway, 1940, while those with A-level or even perhaps a History degree raked up Chanak, 1922 (a hypothetical prize to anyone who knows what that was all about without Googling it) or went back to good old Don Pacifico in 1850. In fact, the history of Parliament getting itself into an almighty tangle over war and foreign policy goes back much, much further. Parliament voting for war based on dodgy evidence, regretting it when that war went badly wrong, then launching various soul-searching investigations that satisfied pretty well nobody – all sounds familiar? But I’m not talking about Iraq and Tony Blair, I’m talking about the second Anglo-Dutch war and King Charles II.

For centuries, foreign policy and war were exclusively a part of the royal prerogative, and Parliament played no part at all in their direction. On the other hand, from its earliest days Parliament voted the taxes to pay for war, so it’s hardly surprising that MPs started to take an interest in how well or badly that money was spent. Charles I’s disastrous wars in the 1620s were heavily criticised in Parliament, while between 1649 and 1653 Parliament was the sole legislative and executive branch of government, so it directly controlled foreign policy – a power that it used to embark on the first Anglo-Dutch war. Following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, King Charles II probably hoped that he could put the genie back in the bottle, but as it happened, it suited his purposes to let it out even further.

By the autumn of 1664, Charles was set on war with the Dutch. Parliament was carried along on a tide of anti-Dutch sentiment, and voted the then unprecedented sum of £2,500,000 for the war. The actual reasons for war were largely contrived – Dutch aggression against English overseas possessions and trade, ignoring the fact that much of the ‘aggression’ actually originated on the English side. Parliament’s support was sustained during the opening stages of the war, which went very well for England (notably in the stunning victory at the battle of Lowestoft on 3 June 1665, the centrepiece of the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies). But 1666 witnessed the calamitous defeat of the Four Days’ Battle – which I’m currently writing about in the first draft of ‘Quinton 5’ – followed by the Great Fire of London, and 1667 saw the utter humiliation of the Dutch sailing into the Medway, hoisting their flag over Sheerness and towing away the fleet flagship, the Royal Charles.

After the war ended, not long after the Medway debacle, an angry Parliament began to investigate what had gone wrong. The House of Commons appointed a committee of miscarriages on 17 October 1667. The next few months witnessed the unsavoury spectacle of admirals and administrators attempting to pin the blame on each other, while ministers sought to settle old scores with each other. (I covered these events in detail in my first book, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy.) Meanwhile a separate body, the so-called Brooke House committee, pored over the navy’s accounts and caused many months of anxiety for Samuel Pepys – and as his wife died during the same period, the famous diarist probably never experienced a more traumatic period in his life. But all the various enquiries petered out. For example, the attempt to assign blame for the Chatham disaster culminated in the scapegoating of the naval commissioner at the dockyard, Peter Pett, a verdict so laughable that the poets had a field day: as I wrote in Pepys’s Navy,

‘[Andrew] Marvell captures perfectly the fate of the ‘little men’ who have always taken the blame for the incompetence of others far greater than themselves:

All our miscarriages on Pett must fall,

His name alone seems fit to answer all.

Whose counsel first did this mad war beget?

Who all commands sold through the navy? Pett.

Who would not follow when the Dutch were beat?

Who treated out the time at Bergen? Pett.

Who the Dutch fleet with storms disabled met?

And, rifling prizes, them neglected? Pett.

Who with false news prevented the Gazette?

The fleet divided? writ for Rupert? Pett.

Who all our seamen cheated of their debt,

And all our prizes who did swallow? Pett.

Who did advise no navy out to set?

And who the forts left unprepared? Pett.

Who to supply with powder did forget

Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend, and Upnor? Pett.

Who all our ships exposed in Chatham net?

Who should it be but the fanatic Pett?

Pett, the sea-architect in making ships,

Was the first cause of all these naval slips;

Had he not built, none of these faults had been;

If no creation, there had been no sin.

In fact, the outraged backbench MPs never cast a glance in the direction of a much more plausible batch of culprits, namely themselves. £2,500,000 proved to be a completely inadequate sum to finance three (or potentially more) years of naval war, and the essentially medieval revenue-raising methods of the state ensured that much of it never actually reached the Treasury. Even so, the MPs had dabbled in foreign policy and the conduct of war. They proved determined to do so again, even before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 established annual meetings of Parliament and gave the legislature much greater control over both spending and strategy – witness the so-called ‘Convoys and Cruisers’ Act of 1694, by which Parliament for the first time assumed the power to insist that a certain number of warships were deployed on particular kinds of mission. During the autumn and winter of 1673-4, for example, Parliamentary opposition to war proved crucial in forcing Charles II to abandon his unpopular alliance with the French and seek a unilateral peace with the Dutch.

So the Parliamentary rebellion over Syria is merely the latest manifestation of a tradition that stretches back to the seventeenth century. I doubt if that’ll be much consolation to David Cameron, but at least he now knows how King Charles II felt in 1667 and 1673: and as his children are direct descendants of the King, thanks to their mum, perhaps he’ll see the irony.

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I’ve got an interesting week ahead. First up, I’m off to Portsmouth to speak at a conference on naval recruiting at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, although I also hope to find the time to pay my first visit to the new Mary Rose Museum. I then head directly for East Anglia to meet up with a Naval Dockyards Society tour that I helped to organise before standing down as chairman; I’ll be acting as their ‘tour guide’ around Dunwich, Southwold and Nelson’s birthplace, Burnham Thorpe. The dates mean that I won’t be blogging next Monday, but I’ll aim to put up at least one post about the museum, the conference and the trip by Tuesday or Wednesday.

The Dai is Cast

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All novelists have a secret fantasy.

Actually, it’s not terribly secret. It’s the cast list.

Yes, admit it, my fellow authors, you know what I’m talking about. That cast list. The one for the film of your book – the lavish Hollywood spectacular or BBC mini-series based on our purple prose, the prize that we all dream about. The films and series that will never, ever, get made, unless our names are… Well, you know who I’m talking about, although I should emphasise that this post was in no way inspired by the arrival on our TV screens of yet another historical epic – cum – soap opera, a veritable Dallas with codpieces, namely the BBC’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen. By coincidence, I provided a checklist for assessing such offerings a few weeks ago, so let’s see how this measures up –

  • Impossibly attractive people with unfeasibly perfect teeth – check
  • People in the past having truly phenomenal amounts of vigorous sex – check
  • People in the past thinking and talking exactly like we do – check
  • All past events accompanied by an incessant orchestral soundtrack. – Actually, The White Queen isn’t too bad on this count; instead, it’s most noticeable quirk is that it was filmed in Belgium, principally in nice but oddly unsuitable Belgian buildings that have rather too many obviously modern windows. (Downton Abbey anachronism pedants, eat your hearts out.)
  • Battles usually fought by about the same numbers of people who can be found brawling outside an average British pub on a Saturday night. – The White Queen seems to have got round this by not having any battles, or at least, not in the first episode, which is all I’ve seen so far. Now you can call me a reactionary old fuddy-duddy, but having a major series about the Wars of the Roses, one of the bloodiest civil wars in British history, without any fighting in it at all, does seem to be taking revisionism just a little too far.

But to return to my original point. Like everybody else, I’ve sometimes speculated idly on who might be cast to play my characters if the books ever got filmed. This is dangerous territory, because every reader will have their own image of each character in their mind’s eye, and, no doubt, each reader will have their own opinion about who should be cast in which part. (I’d love to hear your suggestions!) But I hope I won’t shatter too many people’s perceptions of the characters by putting forward a few of my own ideas. Matthew Quinton would have to be young and tall – although let’s face it, if the vertically challenged Tom Cruise can be cast as seven-foot-something Jack Reacher, anything’s possible. (Similarly, before Master and Commander was made, I doubt if Russell Crowe would have featured on many Patrick O’Brian afficionados’ wish lists of actors suitable to play Jack Aubrey.) Purely on grounds of nepotism, I’d be tempted to cast Jeremy Irvine of War Horse fame; I taught him, albeit only briefly, but then again, I also taught the guy who discovered Coldplay (it was that sort of a school). Whoever plays Francis Gale would have to convey a mixture of pathos, piety and ferocity, so maybe the likes of Hugh Jackman, while Phineas Musk would need to be of fairly indeterminate middle age, bald, and capable of random violence, so perhaps Timothy Spall or Ray Winstone.

And then, of course, we’d come to the 64,000 dollar question in every film set in the Restoration period – who could play Charles II? The king’s face is so firmly imprinted in many people’s consciousness that one can’t take too many liberties with physical appearance (sorry this time, then, Tom Cruise), but the part also requires an actor good enough to convey the many enigmatic sides to the king’s personality. In the last twenty years or so, there have been some triumphant castings – notably Sam Neill in Restoration and Rufus Sewell in the BBC’s The Power and the Passion – and the odd disaster (i.e. John Malkovich in The Libertine, which was a very odd disaster indeed). But the fact is that at the time when Gentleman Captain is set, Charles II was thirty-two years old, so ideally he should be played by an actor much younger than those normally cast in the part. Tall, distinctive features, thirtysomething…hmm, maybe Matt Smith will need something to do after he steps down as Dr Who?

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When this post goes ‘live’, we’ll be hacking up the A1 for a well-earned break in Northumberland (well, OK, Wendy will be having the well-earned break…). There’ll be some walking, some heritage sites, plenty of reading in the evenings*, and in my case, hopefully some serious thinking about both new and Quinton-related ideas. One thing there won’t be where we’re staying, though, is broadband, so tweets etc are likely to be few and far between, and there won’t be a new post here next week, when we’ll be hacking back down the A1!

(* In my case, Melvyn Bragg’s Credo, which is set in the area in the seventh century; it’s some 750 pages long, so I might be quite some time on this one!)

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Finally, in case anybody was wondering, the title of today’s post is the punchline of an old Welsh joke… ‘Notice on theatre door – “The part of the Welshman has been filled. The Dai is cast.’

The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 3

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To finish off this ‘mini-series’ about the ‘thirty ships’ of Charles II’s reign, I thought I’d post a brief history of the Third Rate Hope that I wrote about twelve years ago as part of a leaving present for some friends (called, yes, Hope). This was based on manuscript sources at the National Archives, Kew, notably the ship’s log books and the records of the court-martial to enquire into her loss.

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In the mid-1670s, concern about French expansionism was increasing in England, and Samuel Pepys, the secretary to the admiralty, produced figures before parliament which indicated that numerically, the English fleet had become inferior to the French. This prompted panic, and led parliament to agree to a building programme suggested by Pepys and King Charles II. Thirty new line-of-battle ships were to be built, one of the first rate, nine of the second, and twenty of the third: one of the latter would be named Hope. (I dealt with the genesis of her name in a previous post.) Launched at Castle’s yard in Deptford on 3 March 1679, she was of 1,052 tons, 152 feet long, and mounted seventy guns in wartime. She was intended to have a crew of 300 men in peacetime and 460 in war. Like the Elizabeth, but unlike all the other ships of the programme, the Hope had her thirteenth upper deck gunport squeezed in aft, rather than forward, making her easily recognisable in the drawings of Willem van de Velde the younger. Moreover, a superb dockyard model of either the Hope or the Elizabeth was made in 1684, and is still on display in the Vienna Museum of Technology. (I saw and photographed this during a visit to Vienna in 2004. The museum has some outstanding military and naval exhibits; inter alia, it displays the blood-stained uniform worn by Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he was assassinated in Sarajevo, together with the car in which he was travelling at the time, and the naval uniform worn by Captain von Trapp of Sound of Music fame.)

The model of the Hope (or Elizabeth), Vienna
The model of the Hope (or Elizabeth), Vienna

For the historian of Charles II’s warships, the Hope and the other third rates of the programme ‘must rank among the best looking warships ever built’. Even so, the Hope saw no real naval service for over a decade; on completion, she was laid up ‘in ordinary’, with no masts or guns, and only a small maintenance crew. The outbreak of the war against France in 1689 led to her being fitted out for service at sea. Early in 1690 she was part of a squadron under Admiral Sir Ralph Delaval. On 25 June 1690 the Hope was in the main Anglo-Dutch fleet under the command of Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington. On that day, the French fleet under the Comte de Tourville was sighted, advancing up the English Channel. The battle of Beachy Head that followed on 30 June 1690 was a controversial action in which the Dutch squadron took a hammering.  The Hope formed part of the rear-admiral’s division of the Red squadron. Her captain was George Byng, later first Viscount Torrington and victor of the Battle of Cape Passaro (1718). In the battle, the Hope had eight men killed and eight wounded. The ship provided one witness at the subsequent court-martial of Torrington, who was intended by the ministry as ‘a sacrifice to the allies’, but who was sensationally acquitted by a court composed largely of captains whom he had promoted – one of whom was George Byng of the Hope.

The stern of the model of the Hope
The stern of the model of the Hope

On 13 September 1690 Byng left the ship, and the command passed to Peter Pickard. She arrived at Cork on 21 September and was fired on by Irish Jacobite forces on the following day; she then took part in the attacks that led to the surrender of Cork on the twenty-eighth. The Hope rejoined the main fleet in the Downs on 8 October. After spending the winter at Chatham, she sailed with the fleet from the Nore on 26 April 1691. She spent May off Flanders as part of a squadron under George Churchill, brother of the future duke of Marlborough, before cruising with the Channel fleet. Between 2 and 4 August she was buffeted by a great storm which forced the fleet to run for Plymouth. The Hope made it safely into the Sound, unlike the second rate Coronation, which was wrecked. Captain Pickard left her on 28 August, to be replaced on 7 September by Henry Robinson. The Hope was docked at Portsmouth over the winter, sailing on 26 April 1692. She was part of the fleet that engaged the French off Barfleur on 19 May under the command of Edward Russell. The Hope was the third ship from the rear of the rear-admiral’s division of the Red squadron, between the Cornwall and the Kent. She engaged at 11 a.m. and fought until three, then again from seven until nine; the four hour pause was caused by the thickness of the fog and smoke. Although she pursued the French for the whole of the following day, she was not part of the force that destroyed the remaining French vessels off La Hogue on 22 May. The Hope returned to Spithead for repairs, but was cruising in the Channel again by September. In October she was part of a fleet of 33 ships that chased 22 French vessels out of Saint Malo, but missed them. After wintering at Chatham, she spent the summer of 1693 with the main fleet blockading Brest and the western approaches, before returning to the Medway for another winter.

The Hope sailed to rejoin the fleet on 26 March 1694. On 7 and 8 June 1694 she was part of the force that attempted to land an army at Camaret Bay, near Brest. The operation was a disaster; the French knew it was coming and had strengthened their fortifications, the landing faced heavy resistance, and the commanding general, Thomas Talmash, was killed. The Hope herself was under heavy French fire, and her first lieutenant and several men were killed. She was then in the Channel until October 1694 when she was ordered to Chatham to refit, a process that took until 3 February 1695. Throughout February and March she was made ready for further service at sea. The Hope was the main escort for a convoy to Cadiz when, on 16 April 1695, she fell in with five French warships commanded by the Marquis de Nesmond and Du Guay-Trouin, one of the most successful French admirals in history. The other warships in the convoy, Anglesey and Roebuck, managed to get clear, but the Hope was surrounded. Robinson was sick, his crew was new and untrained, and two of the three lieutenants had been left on shore. Nevertheless, the Hope fought for seven hours against impossible odds, but in the end, with the ship dismasted and seven feet of water in the hold, Robinson had no alternative other than surrender. He and his ship were taken to France, and although Robinson was soon exchanged for an officer of similar rank, the Hope remained a French prize. Commissioned as L’Esperance d’Angleterre, she served in the French navy until she was destroyed at the battle of Vigo, 12 October 1702.

The loss of a Royal Navy ship meant an obligatory court martial, and this was held aboard the Duke at Chatham on 18 October 1695. The president of the court was Admiral Lord Berkeley of Stratton; he was accompanied by two other flag officers, Sir Cloudesley Shovell – who would famously die in 1707 when his fleet mistook its longitude and struck the Scillies – and the Marquess of Carmarthen, son of the Duke of Leeds. Twenty captains made up the remainder of the court. The court-martial papers have been preserved, and are still voluminous – over sixty folios of depositions and exhibits. There was clearly no objection to the defence made by the crew of the Hope – indeed, Robinson was not only exonerated but quickly given command of her sister ship Hampton Court, and the sole lieutenant, Henry Foulis, was given his own command as a reward for his bravery. Instead, the court focused on the events two days before the loss of the Hope, when she and the other two warships had lost contact with their convoy. This was blamed on the negligence of the officer of the watch, Thompson, her senior mate, who had not signalled a course change and had not informed Robinson that they had lost contact with the convoy. When he found out, according to the court records, Robinson exclaimed that ‘if you were not so old a man, I would kick you off the quarter deck’. Thompson was sentenced

‘to be carried with a halter about his neck from ship to ship, to all the ships at Chatham and Gillingham, and his crime be read by beat of drum by each ship’s side; that all the pay due to him in his Majesty’s service be forfeited to the Chest at Chatham; and that he be rendered incapable for ever of serving his Majesty in any capacity for the future as an officer.’

He was then taken to his home town of Dublin and committed to prison there.

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There won’t be a post next week, partly because of Easter, partly because 1 April is my birthday. And yes, that probably does explain a lot!

The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 2

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Richard Endsor's painting of the Lenox, used for the cover of the US editions of The Mountain of Gold
Richard Endsor’s painting of the Lenox, used for the cover of the US editions of The Mountain of Gold

Following last week’s post about the reappearance of the wreck of the 1678 Third Rate Anne, this week’s concentrates on the first of the ‘thirty ships’ of Charles II’s reign, the Lenox, and especially on the exciting project to build a full-sized replica of her.

The Lenox was launched at Deptford dockyard on Friday 12 April 1678 (not on the 18th, as Wikipedia and other sources wrongly claim). The launch ceremony was a spectacular affair, attended by King Charles and his principal mistress of the time, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth; the ship was named after their young son, Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond and Lennox. The idiosyncratic spelling of the ship’s name was entirely down to the King, who had previously decreed that his son should be known as ‘Lenox’ (his handwritten letter expressing his intent in this matter was shown on the recent ITV programme on Goodwood House, presented by Julian Fellowes). The name had a particular importance for the House of Stuart: the male line of the dynasty was actually that of the Earls of Lennox, a title to which Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, would have succeeded had he lived long enough. Darnley was the father of King James VI and I, and thus the great-grandfather of King Charles II, so the latter’s decision to give the ancestral and highly symbolic Lennox title to his son was a powerful statement of his affection for the boy.

The ship named after the young Duke had a moderately notable service career. She did not enter service until 1690, but was then present at the battles of Beachy Head (1690) and Barfleur/La Hogue (1692); rebuilt at Deptford in 1699-1701, she was then present at the Battle of Toulon (1707) and survived the notorious shipwreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet on the Isles of Scilly later in the same year. After a further rebuild in the 1720s, she survived until 1756, when she was sunk as a breakwater at Sheerness. But there would have been little about her career to mark her out as worthy of special attention in the twenty-first century, were it not for the happy conjunction of two seemingly unrelated developments. The first was the publication in 2009 of Richard Endsor’s seminal book, The Restoration Warship. Based on the extensive contemporary evidence of the methods used to build the Lenox, and lavishly illustrated with Richard’s meticulously researched reconstructions,  the book provides by far the most detailed analysis of the construction of a late seventeenth century warship. As Richard says, ‘Lenox can be re-created from  drawings and the complete contemporary documentation made for and during her construction in 1677-78‘, thus presenting a unique opportunity to raise the profile of seventeenth century naval history – still often something of a forgotten era! The second was the opportunity presented by the proposed redevelopment of the site at Convoys Wharf, Deptford. This large piece of derelict land was formerly the heart of the historic Deptford dockyard, established by King Henry VIII in 1513, and includes the site of the double dock in which Lenox was built.

The blocked up entrance to the double dry dock at Deptford, with the master shipwright's house on the left
The blocked up entrance to the double dry dock at Deptford, with the master shipwright’s house on the left

Plans to build a vast new residential complex on the site were mooted soon after the Millennium, but attracted strong opposition and have been sent back to the drawing board several times. (More detail about the current situation at Convoys Wharf can be found in a number of blogs, notably those of the ‘Deptford Dame’ and the owners of the Master Shipwright’s house immediately adjacent to the double dock, the oldest surviving dockyard building in the UK; the current plans for the site, now going through the planning process, can be found here.)

The excavated remains of the wet dock walls, Deptford Dockyard- location of the 'fire' scene in The Mountain of Gold
The excavated remains of the wet dock walls, Deptford Dockyard- location of the ‘fire’ scene in The Mountain of Gold

Faced with the developers’ apparent disregard for the heritage of the site and insistence upon development of an inappropriate scale and nature, local campaigners began to devise a number of counter-proposals which would involve developing projects on a number of parts of the site. Perhaps the most ambitious of these is a project to use Richard’s pioneering research to build a full-size replica of the Lenox, ideally in the double dry dock itself, which survives despite having been filled in after the closure of the Royal Dockyard in the 1860s. Full details of the ‘Build the Lenox’ project can be found on its website, but essentially it would aim to provide heritage-based regeneration, for instance by employing a young local workforce who would then be able to master traditional skills and learn trades that might give them much better prospects in the workplace. Build the Lenox has attracted widespread interest and the backing of a number of prominent figures, including Dame Joan Ruddock MP and Dan Snow (who are both patrons of the project), and I’m happy to be able to support it through this blog, my website, my social media feeds, and by helping with aspects of research.

The question of where exactly the ship might be built remains open to debate, and inevitably, raising sufficient funds is the key to the project, especially in the current difficult environment; but similar projects abroad show that it can be done, although construction of the French reconstruction of the frigate Hermione, launched at Rochfort in 2012, has taken over twenty years to date, and the Dutch replica of De Ruyter’s flagship De Zeven Provincien, being built at Lelystad, has suffered from false starts and long delays. But let’s hope that one day, a new Lenox is launched into the Thames from what was once Deptford Royal Dockyard!

Below: Richard Endsor’s magnificent painting of the launch of the Lenox at Deptford, 12 April 1678. 

(Next week – the third and final part of this series on the ‘thirty ships’ will concentrate on the relatively little-known Hope .)

Launch of Lenox