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King Charles II

Saints and Soldiers: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c.1660-c.1714, Part 3.

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Time for the third and final part of my discussion of warship naming under the later Stuarts. This topic has generated some interesting discussion, so I hope to return to it one day, particularly as more and more interesting connections keep coming out of the woodwork. For example, and despite the fact that the information is available in Warlow’s book on Royal Navy shore establishments, I’d never really registered the fact that some of the most illustrious Stuart warship names, like Royal Charles, Royal James and Royal Prince, were revived for some of the bases established in liberated France and Germany at the end of World War II, and that the historically aware ships’ names committee of the day even added Royal Rupert. At the National Archives last Friday, I also had a look at the papers relating to the establishment in 1945 of HMS Pepys as the shore base for the Far East Fleet at Manus in the Philippines, plus some evidence suggesting that George V didn’t only reject Oliver Cromwell as a battleship name in 1911 but also vetoed Hero for some reason. Moreover, my statement in last week’s post that the navy never had a second ship called St Michael was very nearly wrong; it seems that the ‘fleet submarines’ contemplated in 1925 were to have been given saints’ names, and St Michael would have been the third of these. (The first two would have been St George and St Andrew, also revivals of great 17th century warship names, although there was also a strong campaign to use the name St Christopher too.)

But back to the seventeenth century and some real ships with real names! First, just to clarify one of the points in last week’s post – Pepys’s letter to the Navy Board on 14 April 1679 makes it clear that Charles II had given the name Sandwich to the Third Rate building at Deptford by mistake, as he had ‘from the first design of building the thirty ships determined upon conferring it upon one of the Second Rates out of the regard he is pleased out of his great goodness he bears to the memory of the late noble lord of that name’, so he ordered the Third to be renamed Hope and the Second building at Harwich to be named Sandwich. So – simultaneous proof that Charles II did have a rough plan for the names of at least some of the thirty ships from the very beginning, and that his memory sometimes failed him!

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King James II and VII named few ships during his brief reign, but those that he did select are deeply revealing of the king’s thinking and of the personality flaws that cost him his throne. The last of the ‘thirty new ships’, launched on 23 May 1685, was naturally named Coronation after the event that took place exactly thirty days earlier. Three Fourth Rates were launched in 1687; these were named Deptford, Sedgemoor and St Albans. The Sedgemoor harked back to the naming policy of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when many ships were named after parliamentary victories of the civil war; but both then and in 1687, naming ships after battles in which Englishmen killed Englishmen was hardly a gesture of tolerance and reconciliation. Instead, the name Sedgemoor shows James exulting in his military triumph, and by doing so undoubtedly sending out a subliminal message to other potential rebels. (On the other hand, James did not change the name of the Monmouth; this contrasts with the situation in 1715, when the name of the new Fourth Rate Ormonde was swiftly changed to Dragon following the second Duke of Ormonde’s defection to the Jacobites.) The seemingly bland name St Albans, nominally honouring the town in Hertfordshire, is more likely to have been a reference to England’s first Christian martyr, and might have presaged a succession of other ‘saintly’ ship names if James’s Catholic rule had continued (thus corresponding more closely to naming policy in France and especially in Spain); limited confirmation of this might be the renaming of the Charles as the St George in October 1687, when the old Second Rate of that name was discarded.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-9, which saw the overthrow of James and the installation of his daughter Mary and son-in-law William as joint monarchs, was not accompanied by an immediate mass renaming of the fleet as had taken place in 1660. The legal and emotional ambiguities of James’s alleged ‘abdication’ of his thrones, with many of even the new regime’s supporters having doubts about its legitimacy, led to caution and an awareness of sensibilities; even the Royal James retained its name until 3 March 1691, when it was renamed Victory. Moreover, in 1660 the incoming regime took the view that all public acts of its predecessor were not only illegal, but were entirely null and void, as shown by the insistence on counting that year as the twelfth of the reign of King Charles II. There was no equivalent attempt to cancel an entire period of history after 1688; no-one denied that the reigns of Charles and James had happened[i]. The only other significant renamings of William’s reign and the early part of Anne’s took place when ships were rebuilt, and an opportunity was taken to acknowledge the new political realities. Thus in 1692 the Royal Prince became the Royal William, in 1693 the Royal Charles was renamed Queen for Mary II (there was already a Mary and a Mary Galley, so presumably Royal Mary would have caused too much confusion), in 1701 the Duke became the Prince George and in 1703 the St Andrew became the Royal Anne. Finally, the Albemarle was renamed Union on 29 December 1709 to commemorate the new Anglo-Scottish polity. However, the largest single batch of renamings of major warships before the Hanoverian succession occurred on 18 December 1706, when no fewer than three Second Rates were renamed to reflect the triumphs of the Duke of Marlborough: the St Michael became the Marlborough, the Royal Katherine became the Ramillies, while the Windsor Castle, which had already changed its name in short order from Princess Anne and previously from Duchess, became the Blenheim. These changes were undoubtedly part of the shower of rewards heaped upon Marlborough’s head when he returned to Britain on 26 November 1706 after the triumphant Ramillies campaign; his brother George, effective head of the Admiralty under Prince George of Denmark, was in a position to facilitate what must surely rank as the most notable naval tribute ever paid to a soldier[ii].

The great majority of new builds of the post-1689 era were seemingly given neutral geographical names, such as Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Cumberland and Torbay, all names that were repeated time and time again down the years. However, a few of these had a double meaning, for some, like Shrewsbury and Pembroke, also represented the titles of great political figures of the late Stuart regime, while Torbay, of course, was where William had landed on 5 November 1688. A small number of great ships were given names that harked back to the more overtly partisan and triumphalist policies of earlier eras: these included Association, named after the popular movement of 1696 that took oaths of loyalty in response to an assassination attempt on William III, Barfleur after Admiral Russell’s great victory over the French in 1692, and Boyne after William’s victory in Ireland in 1690. The question of who actually decided on the names of ships after the Glorious Revolution is also much less clear. The first warships launched in William’s reign were a group of five fifth rates, launched between December 1689 and March 1691, but it is apparent that the king could not have been personally responsible for naming most of these as he was campaigning in Ireland for much of that time. However, there is evidence to suggest that the Admiralty, too, did not name the larger ships (although it does seem to have named smaller ones), in which case it seems highly likely that at least some of the names were decided upon by William’s wife, and equal co-monarch, Queen Mary II.

(Finally, big ‘thank you’s’ to Rif Winfield, whose tremendous magnum opus on British warships in the age of sail provided much of the information on dates, etc, and to Richard Endsor, Frank Fox and Peter Le Fevre, who contributed much invaluable information and many stimulating ideas during our email exchanges about the subject matter in the three blogs on this topic.)

[i] However, it is interesting to speculate on whether the name Sedgemoor would have been retained; but that ship was lost on 2 January 1689, before the new regime was established. As it was, many names that were essentially personal to Charles and James were retained: these included the Coronation and the yachts named after Charles’s mistresses, such as the Fubbs and Cleveland.

[ii] The Duke of Wellington has had more ships named after himself and his victories (including the present HMS Iron Duke), but certainly not three on the same day.

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

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

Anyway, on with the matter in hand…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To be concluded)

 

Fubbs Yes, Mum No: The Naming of British Warships, c.1660-c.1714, Part 1

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The material in this week’s post (to be continued in a fortnight – I’ll be at the Olympic Stadium in a week’s time!) was originally intended as the basis for an article in an academic journal. Two things changed my mind, and made me decide to publish it here instead: firstly, I didn’t really have the time to do the research on the other themes I wanted to cover to turn it into a full-scale article; secondly, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the very narrow, introverted world of academic publishing in naval history, particularly with the editorial policy of certain supposedly eminent journals and also the extortionate prices demanded both by the publishers of academic books and the profit-hungry cartels which control the dissemination of academic journals. The UK government’s recent commitment to make scientific research free of access is welcome, but I see no reason why that principle shouldn’t apply to historical research as well – so in future, I’ll be making some of my research freely available here and on my website.

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The naming of warships has always been an essentially political act; witness King George V’s vetoing the name Cromwell for a battleship, the somewhat cynical reasons underpinning the choice of the names Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales for Britain’s new aircraft carriers, and in the United States, the ongoing spats over choosing the names of predominantly Republican presidents for new aircraft carriers and giving other warships the names of living politicians. (See last week’s post for more on this.) However, perhaps no period demonstrates this truth as clearly as British warship-naming in the half-century or so from 1649 onwards.

For many years, if not centuries, monarchs had taken personal responsibility for naming at least some of their ships, particularly the most prestigious ones. For example, Henry VIII dedicated the Henry Grace a Dieu on 13 June 1514, a lavish ceremony also attended by ‘the Queen, the Princess Mary, the Pope’s ambassadors, several bishops, and a large number of nobles’. In January 1610 James I attended the double launching of two East Indiamen  at Deptford, naming them Trade’s Increase and Peppercorn.  He was also present at Woolwich on 24 September 1610 for the failed first attempt to launch the great ship which became the Prince Royal (she was successfully launched in the night following, with Prince Henry performing the naming ceremony).  In late 1620 James viewed and named the Happy Entrance and Reformation at Deptford, although it isn’t clear whether he was present for the actual launchings.  Charles I was on hand for the failed launching of what became the Sovereign of the Seas on 25 September 1637, but confided the name to Sir Robert Mansell who performed the naming ceremony after they finally got her afloat on the night of 13/14 October.1 The tradition was naturally interrupted under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when ships were named by the republican regimes and later by Oliver Cromwell himself,2 but returned at the Restoration. Indeed, one of Charles II’s first executive acts was to change those ship names that reflected the triumphs and personalities of the English Republic into rather more politically correct ones for a monarchy. Pepys witnessed the event, on 23 May 1660, and makes it clear that the process was conducted entirely by the king and his brother the Duke of York, who was about to enter into the office of Lord High Admiral for which he had been intended from childhood:

After dinner the King and Duke altered the name of some of the ships, viz. the Naseby into Charles; the Richard, James; the Speaker, Mary; the Dunbar (which was not in company with us), the Henry; Winsby, Happy Return; Wakefield, Richmond; Lamport, the Henrietta; Cheriton, the Speedwell; Bradford, the Success. 

The name changes are all easily explicable – five of them are for the royal siblings and the Richmond for their cousin, the head of the ‘Lennox Stuart’ line, while Speedwell and Success are natural emotions reflecting the family’s mood at the Restoration. On the other hand, Speedwell was also a traditional warship name – there had been two ships of the name in the Elizabethan navy. The displaced names were overtly political: Naseby, Dunbar, Winceby, Wakefield, Langport, Cheriton and Bradford were all Parliamentarian victories, and by replacing Naseby with the name he shared with his father, the king who had been defeated in that battle, Charles could not have made a more potent symbolic statement. Similarly, Richard had been named after Oliver Cromwell’s son and successor, so there was an interesting symmetry in Charles renaming her after his own heir. Two of the new names actually duplicated ones already on the navy list, a James launched in 1634 and a Success acquired in 1660. Whether nobody thought of, or dared to inform the royal brothers about, this inconvenient clash, or whether Charles and James already knew of it and decided simply to disregard it,  will probably never be known; but as a result, the existing ships had to be swiftly rechristened Old James and Old Success.

For the first fifteen years or so of Charles II’s reign, naming policy closely followed the precedent laid down in May 1660: a heavy emphasis on names that honoured members of the Stuart family, the dynasty as a whole, or key players in the Restoration, together with the revival of well-established warship names which particularly revived memories of the ‘glory days’ of Elizabethan England. Charles followed these principles when changing the remaining interregnum names: Marston Moor became York; Bridgwater, Anne; Torrington, Dreadnought; Tredagh (= Drogheda), Resolultion; Newbury, Revenge; Lyme, Montagu; Preston, Antelope; Maidstone, Mary Rose; Taunton, Crown; Nantwich, Bredah (where Charles had signed the declaration promising liberty of conscience which guaranteed his restoration).  Entirely new names included Royal Katherine, after his wife; Royal Oak; Rupert, after his cousin; Cambridge and Edgar, after short-lived nephews; Monmouth, after his eldest illegitimate son. Other revivals of Elizabethan names to set alongside the likes of the newly rebranded Dreadnought and Revenge included Defiance and Warspite. 

There were some idiosyncratic quirks, too. Sweepstakes reflected the court’s love of gambling, while the Fubbs Yacht was named after his mistress, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (specifically, after the chubbiness of her naked form!). More significantly, the choice of St Michael in 1669 for a large Second Rate raises some fascinating questions. The name St Michael had never been used for an English warship before, and it would never be used again. (However, a similar name had been used for the greatest of all Scots warships, launched in 1511.) The launching ceremony was planned for Michaelmas Day, 29 September, which was one of the most important feast days in the royal liturgical calendar; in the event, though, unspecified ‘difficulties’ forced the postponement of the launch until the next morning. However, the timing of the launch also coincided with Anglo-French negotiations for a military and naval alliance against the Dutch entering a critical phase, with Charles talking in increasingly belligerent terms of obtaining revenge for the humiliation he had suffered at Chatham in 1667, and with the king expressing to his most intimate confidantes an apparently sincere determination to announce his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Thus there may have been several complex reasons underpinning Charles II’s decision at this particular time to name a great man-of-war after this particular saint, the only one (other than national patrons) that he honoured in this way: Michael, the avenging archangel, the protector of Israel and patron saint of warriors, the bearer of the flaming sword of vengeance and justice; the victorious commander of the armies of the righteous in the final battle against the forces of evil.

Finally, there was one glaring omission from the list of names chosen by the king. Intriguingly, Charles did not name a ship Henrietta Maria after his mother, although there had been a Second Rate of that name before (launched in 1633, she was renamed Paragon in 1650, thereby displaying a delicious irony not always associated with the Rump Parliament; the ship was lost in 1655). Perhaps this omission was a reflection of the famously strained relationship between mother and son.

(Next time, I’ll take a detailed look at the naming of the ‘thirty new ships’ and will make a few points about naming policy after Charles II’s reign.)

1 Ex info Frank Fox

2 For the naming policy of the period 1649-60, see M J Seymour’s article in The Mariner’s Mirror, 1990.

 

 

Captains and Kings

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First, apologies for not posting last week. As I mentioned on Twitter, I paid the price for getting too carried away on ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and typing over 8,000 words in two days with little regard for ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. The result was that I woke up the next morning with a hand resembling a red balloon, and it stayed that way for the best part of a fortnight. Unsurprisingly the doctor diagnosed RSI and advised me to stop typing for a while. (The hand is much improved– thanks to all those who expressed concern!) So this blog is now brought to you via voice recognition software, and I just hope the neighbours don’t get too annoyed as I dictate emails, tweets, blogs and large chunks of books at strange hours of the day and night.

From next week, I’ll be building up to the UK publication of The Blast That Tears the Skies with a series of posts examining the various contexts of the book: the second Anglo-Dutch war, the years 1665, and the battle of Lowestoft (3 June 1665) which forms the climax of the story.

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In my last post, I looked at the ways in which Samuel Pepys was often presented in an exaggerated way as ‘the founder of the modern Royal Navy’/’the saviour of the Navy’/etc. It’s always seemed to me that Pepys’s principal importance was as a creator of systems and an implementer of policy; when it comes to devising policy,  though, we have to remember that late 17th-century England was still overwhelmingly dominated by royal power, and this was especially true of the Navy. Charles II and his brother James, who served as Lord High Admiral from 1660-67, were genuinely and passionately interested in the Navy, and were largely responsible for a number of the initiatives that have often been attributed to Pepys. I wrote about Charles’s role in detail some 20 years ago in a paper published by the Royal Stuart Society. Here are some of the points I made then, which still seem to me to have stood the test of time:

An Admiralty commission came into being [in 1673], but most of the truly important powers of the Admiralty – notably the power to appoint commissioned officers – were reserved to Charles…there was no revolution in naval administration in 1673. It is even possible to take the view that Charles and James simply swapped jobs, with the duke now playing the part of the informal advisor to the lord admiral [the King]. The key change was the appointment of Pepys, who acted far more as a permanent naval secretary to the King than as secretary to the comparatively insignificant Admiralty commission [of 1673-9]. Although this body met regularly, it served largely…as a vehicle for debate, not as an executive council. Discussions sometimes had to be deferred until the King was present, while the absence of the court or meetings of parliament led to long intervals between meetings of the board. As a result, the daily executive direction of naval affairs rested with Charles, who relied heavily on the advice of James and Pepys.  

The main administrative task was the appointment of officers. Pepys presented to the King shortlists which specified the candidates’ experience and recommendations, and Charles then picked the successful candidate. It might be easy for Pepys’s admirers to create a picture of the Admiralty secretary doing all the work and using the King merely as a rubber stamp, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Charles prided himself on his personal knowledge of his sea-officers; indeed, one of the by-products of this, of the King’s interest in the navy, and of the easy informality of the court, was the ease with which naval officers could gain access to him. Thus for Charles, appointing an officer was not a case of sticking pins in shortlists or pulling names out of hats… [Charles also decided on ships’ names, and this was a matter of much greater political significance than one might assume – I’ll return to this issue in a future post.]

The weight of business which fell on the king during this period ensured that, even though he might be able to escape from most other aspects of government when he went to Newmarket, he could not escape from the navy; indeed, for most of the time this seems to have been perhaps the only kind of formal work which he actually did when he went there. In addition to meeting the Admiralty board there on occasions, he regularly signed commissions and warrants there, and his presence ensured that Pepys often had to go to Newmarket himself to carry on the work of the navy…

In addition to being largely responsible for the ‘thirty ships’ programme [of 1677, Charles] initiated several reforms (such as the extension of the principle of ‘half pay’ to officers not on active service) and gave his backing to others, such as the introduction in 1677 of Pepys’s scheme to examine the competence of candidates for lieutenancies. Above all, the King decided on the deployment of warships… [he] personally selected the ships to be employed, sometimes rejecting advice from the Admiralty or Navy Board because of his differing opinion about the relative merits of individual vessels. He took a particular interest in the more unusual and ambitious voyages. When Captain John Narbrough sailed to the South Seas in 1669, he saw the King and Duke of York several times before his departure, and on his return in 1671 the King ordered him to Whitehall on the very day that Narbrough arrived in the Thames, subsequently spending several hours discussing the captain’s voyage with him. In 1677, Narbrough was preparing to go out as admiral to the Mediterranean…between 6 June and 13 July, when he left London for his flagship at Portsmouth, Narbrough met the King alone on three occasions, the Duke of York alone on one, and the royal brothers together once…During the same period, the Admiralty commission met eleven times, chiefly to discuss Narbrough’s instructions for prosecuting the war against Algiers, and Charles attended all but one of these meetings – an attendance record not atypical of the entire period [1673-9].

[Charles continued take an active role in naval affairs even in the year 1679-84, when the powers of the Admiralty were in theory out of his hands and held instead by a commission of opposition parliamentarians – on more than one occasion he even ordered entire squadrons to sea without the Admiralty’s knowledge.]

So what I hope all this demonstrates is that the naval history of the Restoration period wasn’t just ‘the Samuel Pepys show’: it was very much a collaboration between Pepys and the royal brothers, with the latter often playing the principal role because of both their status and their personal enthusiasm for the service. Looking at the naval evidence also gives one a very different picture of King Charles II to that of the lazy, womanising rake that still sometimes appears in romantic fiction and even on children’s TV!

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?

Gentleman in the First Person

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A few weeks ago, Susan Keogh, author of the Jack Mallory chronicles, posted a pretty positive and particularly thoughtful review of Gentleman Captain, in which she raised a couple of interesting and important critical points. I’ve been meaning to post about these for some time, but a combination of holidays and the completion of the revised draft of the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, means that I’ve not had a chance to do so until now.

First of all, Susan clearly doesn’t like first person narration, finding it too limiting. In terms of my own reading, I’d largely agree with her – and the use of the first person has caused me a few interesting plot construction issues in Blast, where it’s been essential for me to have more than one viewpoint character. (Having said that, I think the device I’ve adopted to get round the problem works very well, and fortunately, so far and touching a lot of wood, my critical readers agree!) But the reason why I adopted a first person narrative goes back to the very origins of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’. In the early days of writing Gentleman Captain, I experimented with an alternative version of the first few chapters which used third person narration. Somehow, though, it didn’t feel quite as immediate or dramatic, particularly during the shipwreck scene at the very start of the book; and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this experiment confirmed my original instinct. One of my key objectives with the series is to tell the whole story of the Royal Navy from the 1580s, the era of the Spanish Armada, to the 1720s, when something that was much more recognisably the navy of Horatio Nelson was taking shape. Telling the story through the eyes of ‘old Matthew’, and giving him a grandfather who had been one of Drake’s contemporaries and rivals, achieved this purpose admirably as far as I was concerned, and would have been much harder to do from third person viewpoints; moreover, it presented plenty of opportunities for humour, with an archetypal ‘grumpy old man’ comparing the dog days of his youth with the supposedly ‘improved’ world around him.

Susan’s other point is that surely Matthew wouldn’t have been as ignorant of the sea as I’ve made him. Well, the short answer to this is – yes, he would. This was one of the key points about the commissioning of young aristocrats and gentlemen by King Charles II and his brother James; many of them literally were entirely ignorant of the sea, particularly in the early years after the Restoration (the setting of Gentleman Captain). Moreover, many of them actually believed that it was important to remain ‘ignorant’ – seamanship being regarded as a ‘rude, mechanical’ art, and thus beneath the honour and dignity of men of their social status. It’s true that some went against this belief, and I’ve based Matthew on the likes of Captain Francis Digby, a real historical figure of the 1660s whose manuscript journals reveal that he gradually – but only gradually – became a highly competent navigator and seaman. But there were others who held to the older philosophy that a captain was essentially in charge of the military aspects of a ship’s operations alone, and in The Mountain of Gold (and then much more extensively in Blast) I’ve introduced the character of Matthew’s friend Captain Beau Harris, who is again based on several real people and who actually revels in his determination to learn nothing of the seaman’s art, in order to provide a sharper counterpoint to Matthew’s determination to improve. One of the key themes of the series of ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’ will be the way in which ‘gentlemen captains’ like Matthew Quinton gradually won out, thus preparing the ground for the Jack Aubreys and their real-life equivalents in the future. But it wasn’t an overnight process, and during the 1660s many a young captain like Matthew Quinton might well have struggled with an inner conflict between received opinions of what should be beneath the honour of a gentleman and their own recognition of the qualities necessary for a successful ship’s captain.