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King James II

The Shortening of Sail After the Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665

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To mark the 350th anniversary of the battle, I’ve been tweeting the key events at the appropriate times during the day. However, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the battle doesn’t lend itself readily to Twitter. After destroying the Dutch flagship during the day’s action – a brief description of which can be found here – the Duke of York’s fleet began to pursue the Dutch, who were in considerable confusion and lacked a proper command structure. During the night of 3-4 June, though, the fleet was ordered to shorten sail. Why this happened has always been something of a mystery. Here’s what I wrote in Pepys’s Navy; I believe I’m right in saying that I was the first historian to find and cite Brouncker’s justification of his actions. After the references, I’ve added my fictional account from The Blast That Tears The Skies, as witnessed by the future admiral Edward Russell, serving as a volunteer on Matthew Quinton’s ship, but temporarily aboard the flagship Royal Charles after carrying despatches to the Duke of York. (In reality, Russell went to sea for the first time in the following year.)

The Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, showing the 'Royal Charles' and the 'Eendracht'. Hendrik van Minderhout. National Maritime Museum
The Battle of Lowestoft, 3 June 1665, showing the ‘Royal Charles’ and the ‘Eendracht’. Hendrik van Minderhout. National Maritime Museum

The narrow escape of the heir to the throne may explain the strange failure to follow up the crushing victory of Lowestoft, and to turn it into a complete annihilation of Dutch maritime power. The British fleet shortened sail during the night, supposedly because a courtier on the flagship, Henry Brouncker, deluded the flag captain, John Harman, and the ship’s master, John Cox, into believing that he was relaying the (sleeping) duke’s orders to that effect. It was subsequently suggested by the Earl of Clarendon that Brouncker, ‘a disreputable friend (and alleged pimp) of James’, had promised Clarendon’s daughter, the duchess of York, that he would bring her husband home safely, or else that he acted unilaterally to preserve the life of the heir to the throne (and, by implication, his own, as satirists and politicians were quick to point out)[i]. The matter was investigated in Parliament in October 1667 and April 1668, when, with the finger of suspicion pointing firmly in his direction, Brouncker panicked and fled abroad[ii]. His ex post facto defence, written from Paris in June 1668, made no mention of the duchess, but accused Harman, Cox and the other witnesses of perjury and contradicting each other. Brouncker implied that he was merely passing on the duke’s order not to engage during the night, which was then misinterpreted by Harman and Cox as an order to shorten sail; he also claimed that Cox did not sooner put on sail again because the night was so dark, and it was impossible to distinguish enemy and friendly lights[iii].

Regardless of Brouncker’s actions and subsequent justifications of them, it was clear that some ships on the British side would have found it difficult to mount a hot pursuit on the night of 3-4 June. Sandwich’s Royal Prince had to slow down to replace her main topsail, which had been ‘shot to pieces’, while the Bonadventure, which had spent almost all her powder and shot, had to lay by in the night to mend her rigging, ‘having every running rope in the ship shot, and [i.e. as well as] most of our main yard and bowsprit and spritsail yard’[iv]. Even so, none of this should have been sufficient to prevent a general chase being ordered. Up to a point, the failure to do so can be attributed to the clearly confused chain of command aboard the flagship and to Brouncker himself; whether he was acting maliciously or inadvertently is effectively irrelevant. However, Brouncker’s suggestion that James, who must have been exhausted and in some degree of shock after his narrow escape, gave an ambiguous order and then expected his subordinates to second-guess his meaning is entirely in keeping with the duke’s personality and subsequent track record as an admiral (he did something similar at [the Battle of]Solebay [28 May 1672][v]) and as king. As it was, the fleet only returned to a ‘running posture’ at about 4 a.m. on 4 June, too late to prevent the more northerly remnant of the Dutch fleet, commanded by Tromp and Evertsen, getting through the Texel sea-gate at about noon[vi].

[i] J R Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, 158.

[ii] J D Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy, 150, 156.

[iii] British Library, Additional MS 75,413, piece 9.

[iv] Sandwich Journal, Navy Record Society, 228; Lincolnshire Archives Office, MS Jarvis 9/1/A/1, log of Christopher Gunman.

[v] Journals and Narratives of the Third Dutch War, Navy Records Society, 175.

[vi] National Maritime Museum, WYN/13/6.

 

And now, from The Blast That Tears The Skies…

 

Beneath a brilliant orange dawn, the sea was empty. Of the Dutch fleet, there was no sign.

That could mean only one thing: they had got through the sea-gates. Somehow, we had let them get away.

I had been summoned to the quarterdeck in the middle of the night, at about two in the morning, when the great stern lanterns aboard the Royal Charles had flickered the signal that she was shortening sail. I had been in a dead sleep for perhaps three hours, far too little to be properly rested, and had sprung from my sea-bed forgetting my wounded foot, which screamed a reminder to me as it struck the deck. Thus I had limped onto the quarterdeck in a confused state, noted the action of the flagship, relayed its order to my own officers and thus to the hands aloft, who had promptly set about adjusting the clew-lines and the like, and had not really pondered its consequences before returning to my slumber. But when I returned to the deck at dawn, expecting the imminent resumption of the battle, I realised at once that all was wrong – beginning with the assumptions I had made in the middle of the night.

The Royal Charles might have ordered a shortening of sail because we were in danger of over-running the Dutch in the night. Well, not so,as was now all too evident.

The Royal Charles might have ordered a shortening of sail because our scouts had seen the Dutch do the same. Also not so, equally evidently.

The Royal Charles might have ordered a shortening of sail because the Dutch had already escaped within their sea-gates, and we were in danger of being blown onto their lee shore. Plainly not so, for we were still too far out to sea and with plenty of sea-room.

Thus either the Dutch fleet had been spirited away by their ally Beelzebub, or, rather more likely, something terribly wrong had happened aboard the Royal Charles.

I was fortunate to learn the truth before almost any other man in the fleet, for later that morning, as we despondently sighted the masts of the Dutch safe behind Texel, Cherry Cheeks Russell returned aboard the Merhonour and breathlessly recounted all he had seen and heard. Realising the importance of his evidence, I set him at once to write down his account, albeit in his execrable spelling.

Russell had stayed all night upon the quarterdeck (or, as he wrote it, ‘kwotadek’) of the Royal Charles, excited beyond measure by the sights and sounds around him – even by the spectacle of seamen scrubbing the deck clean of the blood of Lord Falmouth and the rest – and eager to catch sight of the Dutch by the first light of dawn. Thus he witnessed the arrival upon deck of Harry Brouncker, evidently intent upon conversation with Captain Cox, the sailing master, who had the watch.

‘New orders from His Royal Highness,’ said Brouncker officiously to Cox, ‘entrusted to me before he retired. He considers it too dangerous for the fleets to engage during the night, Captain, and wishes you to adjust your course accordingly.’

Cox, whom I knew as a capable and quick-witted man, looked at Brouncker suspiciously. ‘Adjust my course, Mister Brouncker? But if I adjust my course, every ship in the fleet has to adjust its own, dependent upon the signal from our lanterns.’ He looked up at the three huge structures at the stern, in each of which burned a fire that marked the flagship’s position by night.

‘That is what His Royal Highness means, Captain Cox. The fleet is not to engage by night.’

‘Then does he mean for us to shorten sail? Look at all the lights ahead of us, man. Some of them are our scouts, but most are the Dutch. We will be up with them well before dawn unless we shorten sail.’

Brouncker looked about him nervously, or so young Russell thought. ‘Well, then, Captain, that is what His Royal Highness means. The fleet to shorten sail.’

Cox stared steadily at him. ‘I’ll not order such a thing,’ he said. ‘I need to wake Captain Harman.’

Captain, later Admiral Sir, John Harman
Captain, later Admiral Sir, John Harman

He crossed the quarterdeck, knelt down and shook a bundle that lay between two culverins. The bluff, handsome John Harman, captain of the Royal Charles, stirred at once and got to his feet. His own cabin had been given over to Sir William Penn, but even so, Harman had an ample sea-bed awaiting him below; although he wore his hair long and dressed as a cavalier, in times of drama, like many of the true old tarpaulins, he still preferred to sleep on deck under one of the sheets that gave its name to his kind.

In hurried whispers, half-overheard by Russell, Cox apprised Harman of the situation. The two men approached Brouncker, and Harman said, ‘To shorten sail, Mister Brouncker? But that risks allowing the Dutch to escape us. You are certain that this is the Duke’s intention?’

‘I have said so, upon my word,’ blustered Brouncker. ‘We must not engage in the night. The fleet to shorten sail, if that is what it takes.’

Cox was anxious. ‘Perhaps we should wake Sir William,’ he said.

Harman frowned. ‘We could attempt to wake Sir William, but I doubt if it would do us any good.’

Every man on the quarterdeck, indeed probably every man on the Royal Charles – including even young Cherry Cheeks Russell – knew full well that the only way in which the Great Captain Commander could obtain some relief from the gout by night, and thus some precious sleep, was by taking some of the more potent drugs in the surgeon’s chest and washing them down with prodigious quantities of the strongest drink on the ship. Thus waking Sir William Penn would be akin to dragging the dead out of their graves before the sounding of the Last Trump.

‘In that case,’ said Cox, ‘surely we should awaken His Royal Highness, to seek confirmation of his intentions?’

Russell saw Brouncker gesticulate angrily at Cox. ‘Damnation, man, do you doubt my word? My word as a gentleman? I have told you His Royal Highness’s order, sir!’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Harman, ‘it would be best to have the Duke’s confirmation –‘

‘And do you really think he will thank you, Captain Harman, if you wake him and he finds you have done so merely to confirm an order that he has already given through me? What will that do to your prospects of becoming Admiral Harman, do you think?’ That struck home; by tradition, the captain of the fleet flagship had the first claim upon a vacant flag, and with Sansum dead, Harman’s path to promotion lay open, pending confirmation by the Duke of York.

Yet Cox and Harman clearly remained unconvinced. Russell overheard snatches of their conversation: they were worried by the proximity of the Dutch and the dangers of a night engagement, but equally alarmed at the prospect of slowing the fleet too much and allowing the Dutch to escape.

As the two officers debated, Cherry Cheeks watched Brouncker become increasingly agitated. At last he strode up to Cox and Harman and almost bellowed in their faces.

‘Think upon what you do here tonight!’ cried the red-faced courtier. ‘For all we know, the plague or a fanatic’s bullet might have carried away Charles Stuart this day, and the man sleeping beyond that bulkhead might at this very moment be King of England, by the Grace of God! Are you really prepared to deny the will of Majesty, Captain Cox? Captain Harman, are you?’

Cox and Harman exchanged one last, despairing glance. Then Harman said decisively, ‘Very well, then. Captain Cox, you will give the orders for the Royal Charles to shorten sail. I will see to the transmission of that order to the fleet. May God grant that we do the right thing.’

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!

 

 

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.

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.

 

 

Solebay 340, Part 3

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The Battle of Solebay did little to foster greater unity within the combined fleet. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the battle the bitterest recriminations were not those between the British and the French, but those between individual officers in the two fleets. Sir Joseph Jordan and Sir John Kempthorne, Sandwich’s two subordinate flag officers in the blue squadron, were both accused of not supporting their commander. The most damning criticism of Jordan came from Sandwich’s flag captain, Richard Haddock, who accused him of failing to come to the aid of the Royal James. Although Charles and James excused Jordan’s conduct, the ancient admiral had fought his last battle. He retired to Hatfield in Hertfordshire with a royal pension of £500 a year and lived on into his eighties, just long enough to witness the succession of his old commander-in-chief to the British thrones. Meanwhile, d’Estrées launched a vitriolic attack against his own second-in-command, Duquesne. This led to the removal of the Huguenot admiral, an act that was inevitably given an unfavourable religious interpretation by English commentators. Early accounts of the conduct of the French as a whole were mixed. For example, Ralph Verney of Claydon, Buckinghamshire, had been serving on the Prince. When he wrote to his father Edward on 29 May he had time only for a brief account of the few facts he knew, such as the loss of Sandwich and the Royal James; he made no mention of the French at all. By 2 June, he was able to write ’tis certaine the French…behaved themselves gallantly in the fight at sea’, but four days later he wrote ‘the French have lost all that glory, that the first newes brought of their feates at sea. For they were so discreet as to keepe themselves quite out of danger, soe that they lost their men, nor hurt their tackle’ – a charge which was patently untrue, and sounds suspiciously like a case of the younger Verney jumping on a populist bandwagon. Similar rumours swept through the court, the navy and the coffee-houses of London in the early days of June. However, many of these criticisms have to be set in the context of wider political agendas. As Verney pointed out, anyone who censured the French ‘is thought a malignant, and against the court’, and conversely, tales of French misconduct were inevitable at a time when many in the political nation were opposed to the French alliance and the Dutch war. Many had expected the French to betray the British, so in that sense, Solebay provided almost reassuring wish-fulfilment.

In fact, there were few, if any, grounds on which to criticise the conduct of the French squadron at Solebay. The French were the van squadron, and would therefore expect to lead the combined fleet’s line-of-battle to sea – unless they received contradictory orders from the commander-in-chief. Both British and French sources indicate that the only order of any sort which d’Estrées received was a verbal one to keep as close to the wind as he could, an order which did not imply a preference for one tack or the other. If d’Estrées followed the blue and red squadrons to the north he would almost certainly have fallen to leeward of the Dutch; similarly, the direction taken by the British fleet was born of pragmatism, rather than design, because in the flood tide between five and seven on the morning of 28 May, with the wind at east-south-east, the ships would already have had their heads to the north. Why were no clearer orders given? In the first place, the Dutch attack was an almost complete surprise, with the allies having placed too much store on intelligence reports which indicated the Dutch were in their own anchorages; consequently, many accounts of the battle indicate that all parts of the combined fleet, including the French, were in considerable confusion for some time, and many ships cut their anchor cables in their frantic endeavours to gain sea room. Crucially, the confusion seems to have been particularly great aboard the fleet flagship, the Prince, which had begun to careen at two in the morning of the twenty-eighth. When the approach of the Dutch was reported at about three, her master noted ‘[we] cleared shipp in Gods name’, but even so, the ship was only ready for action by seven, half-an-hour before she engaged and some time after she had got under sail. The ship had been heeled over for the careen and her yards had been topped. Therefore, for an indeterminate amount of time after three it is doubtful whether the flagship could have made many signals at all, and there is no evidence that James ever attempted to communicate with individual ships or squadrons; the only signal recorded in all the contemporary accounts is the general one for the fleet to weigh, namely a gun firing and the Prince’s foretopsail being let loose.

It is not even clear whether James was with the ship throughout the night, or whether he had returned hastily to her from quarters ashore; and if so, when. A Southwold restaurant still bears a plaque recording the local tradition that it was the duke’s headquarters ashore prior to the battle (as well as preserving the delicious legend that the doomed Sandwich spent his last night on earth in the building, bedding a local serving wench). Local legend also recalls a panicked recall of men from ashore and suggests that many men were drunk, having been given leave by the duke to celebrate the Whitsun holiday; even if there is only a grain of truth in these stories, the fleet’s response to de Ruyter’s attack was clearly disorganised and hastily improvised. At about six, d’Estrées sent one of his officers, Hérouard, to request specific orders, but received in reply only the verbal command to keep close to the wind. Sir Julian Corbett’s remark that ‘it apparently never entered the duke’s head to tell [the French] the rear was to lead’ makes perfect sense if it is set in the context of a flagship aboard which confusion reigned and to which the admiral might have returned only recently, without time to assess the situation fully. Moreover, James had a habit of giving peremptory and ambiguous commands, then expecting his subordinates to second-guess his meaning. It is therefore entirely possible that the Duke of York simply forgot to give, or did not properly explain, a simple but essential part of an order whose verbal nature again suggests an element of haste. Significantly, James never seems to have suggested, even in private, that the French had disobeyed his orders.

Nevertheless, perception was all, and the popular perception was undoubtedly that the French had been duplicitous. This impression was reinforced during the course of the war – by Louis XIV’s triumphalist campaign in the Netherlands and above all by the naval battle of the Texel / Kijkduin on 11 August 1673, when the French fleet again separated from the two British squadrons but this time failed to engage in a meaningful way and allegedly disobeyed a recall command, again allegedly because it was under secret orders from Louis to permit the British and the Dutch to hammer each other. The growing opposition to the war was reflected in Parliament and ultimately forced Charles II to make a unilateral peace with the Dutch early in 1674, but more importantly it can be argued (and has been, by the likes of Steve Pincus and myself) that Solebay, the Texel and the war as a whole were critical in developing a popular mindset which regarded the French, rather than the Dutch, as the natural national enemy.

Solebay 340, Part 2

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Despite their impressive outward appearance, the French ships simply had no experience of operating in such a large fleet in wartime. Even before d’Estrées arrived at Spithead, King Charles II himself, at a meeting of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, expressed the view that the Duke of York should ‘ripen the Fr[ench] in passage and rules of sailing and fighting etc before they fall in with the Dutch’, adding that it would be better if the French were not committed to battle too soon. After the juncture of the fleets, the French were regularly found guilty of manoeuvring and sailing errors by experienced British officers, whose comments ranged from the sympathetic to the caustic.  Only time could have righted these problems, and the Dutch were well aware of this; after all, they had their own experience of undertaking combined operations with the French during 1666-7. Moreover, the Dutch urgently needed to upset the seemingly inexorable progress of the Anglo-French ‘grand design’ and its war machine. By the end of May 1672, the United Provinces were in dire straits. Maaseik had fallen, Orsoy, Rheinberg and Burick were all under attack, and the main French armies under Marshal Turenne and Louis XIV himself were at Cleves, on course to accomplish the hugely symbolic (and, for the Dutch, strategically disastrous) feat of crossing the Rhine on 2 June. Meanwhile, the allied armies of Cologne and Munster were pouring across the eastern border into Overijssel and laying siege to Groningen. In the midst of this desperate crisis, Michiel De Ruyter took his fleet to sea. With him went Cornelis De Witt, political representative of his brother Johan and the States-General, who sat calmly in a velvet-covered armchair on the quarterdeck of the flagship De Zeven Provincien as battle raged around him.

 The Fleets at Solebay Ships Guns
Allies 82 (French = 30) 4942
Dutch 75 4208

De Ruyter had already made an abortive attempt to engage before the juncture of the two allied fleets, and when he learned on 27 May that the combined fleet was moored in Sole Bay to take on provisions (it had arrived there on the twenty-third), he immediately ordered his fleet to attack, taking the allies by surprise in the early hours of the twenty-eighth. At three that morning, the master of the victualling ship Friendship saw an incoming scout raise the alarm by letting her topgallant sails fly loose and firing her guns. The combined fleet was moored parallel to the shore in its squadrons and divisions: the French squadron, forming the van, was the most southerly and westerly, with Duquesne’s division the southernmost of all, while the earl of Sandwich’s blue squadron lay to the north and east of James’s red squadron. The wind was from the east-south-east, the Dutch approaching from the north-east. What happened next was to be the most controversial aspect of the battle, and the cause of both contemporary and later criticism of the conduct of the French. While both the blue and red squadrons got underway to the north on the starboard tack, thereby reversing the order of the fleet, d’Estrées got underway to the south on the port tack. The spectacle of the French fleet going in the opposite direction to its British allies was the origin of the charge that the French had deliberately deserted the rest of the combined fleet. In fact, the French put up a good fight against Adrian Banckert’s Zeeland squadron, which was detached to engage them: up to 450 French mariners were killed, among them des Rabesnières, one of the architects of the naval alliance, who was subsequently honoured with a spectacular funeral in the choir of  Rochester Cathedral. This heavily publicised and deeply symbolic act was as much a tribute to the dead officer’s Protestant faith as to his gallantry, and perhaps was also intended to reconcile those who saw it or read about it in their newsletters or Gazettes to what was already an unpopular alliance with a Catholic power.

While the French fought and died to the south, the British fleet was hotly engaged to the north. The light winds ensured that the whole scene was soon shrouded in smoke, adding to the confusion and making it difficult to identify misconduct. The flagship Prince was under sail by 5.30 (no small achievement, as she had been heeled over to careen only two hours before) and by eight was engaged with the Dutch. De Ruyter personally targeted the Prince; although she was easily identifiable to the trained eye, the huge royal standard at her main made her unmistakable. De Ruyter now delivered one of the laconic bon mots for which he was famous. Turning to his helmsman, he said ‘Mate Zeger, that’s our man’. Zeger replied ‘Sir, that’s what shall happen’. The Prince was soon under fire from seven ships and could obtain no relief from her seconds, which were becalmed. The Duke of York ignored the risks to the life of the heir to the throne, striding across the deck to encourage the men and ordering the helmsman to edge ever closer to the enemy. Several of his retinue were cut down on either side of him, but the duke bore a charmed life. The new acting captain of the Prince, John Narbrough, was impressed: ‘no prince upon the whole earth can compare with his Royal Highness in gallant resolution in fighting his enemy…he is general, soldier, pilot, master, seaman; to say all, he is everything that man can be, and most pleasant when the great shot are thundering about his ears’. By midday the Prince was effectively disabled, her main topmast shot away and her mainsail rendered useless by the fallen mast. With Dutch fireships bearing down for the kill, Narbrough ordered the ship’s boats to tow her to safety, and James shifted his flag to the St Michael; when that ship in turn became shattered, he moved to the London. Other ships were in almost as bad a state. The Resolution had seven feet of water in the hold and had to drop of the line. The Royal Katherine was taken by the Dutch, then retaken shortly afterwards when some of her gunners managed to overpower the Dutch prize crew; even so her captain Sir John Chicheley, who was also the squadron’s rear-admiral, had already been taken off and was on his way to captivity in Holland. The Red squadron fought on until about eight in the evening, when the two fleets finally parted.

The main force of the Dutch attack had been directed against the squadron nearest to them, the Blue, and especially against Sandwich’s flagship, the brand new 100-gun First Rate Royal James. The Blue had little time to organise itself into a line of battle, and the Royal James was soon isolated. Immobilised by Jan Van Brakel’s Groot Hollandia, which became entangled in her bow cables and rigging, Sandwich’s ship was subjected to a devastating bombardment by Van Ghent’s flagship Dolfijn. An order for Jordan and his division to come up to her assistance was deliberately ignored; at least, that was the interpretation placed on events by Richard Haddock, Sandwich’s flag captain, who recorded how Jordan ‘passed by us to windward very unkindly…and took no notice at all of us’. Jordan’s own account of the action effectively ignored the issue, concentrating instead on how his Sovereign and the rest of his division had fought all day (or so he claimed) against eight or nine large Dutch ships. Meanwhile Charles Wylde, captain of the Bristol in the Red squadron, had tacked at noon and fought to the south-eastward for two hours, ‘having a hot and bloody fight without any cessation, and so kept on, they having the wind to our great disadvantage’. At about two, the Bristol passed to leeward of the Royal James and saw the great ship on fire. She had been attacked by three fireships, one of which, the Vrede under Captain Jan Daniëlszoon van den Rijn, had been secured to her port quarter and successfully ignited. With many of her men already dead or wounded (including her flag captain, Haddock, who had been shot in the foot) the Royal James no longer had the resources to fight off the attack or to put out the flames. By four, when the hastily repaired Prince came up, the Royal James was burned out. The fate of Sandwich was a mystery until his bloated body, recognisable only by the Garter ribbon that he still wore, was fished out of the sea on 10 June, thirty miles from the grave of the Royal James. Wylde of the Bristol, who clearly wrote up his ship’s log contemporaneously, prayed ‘the Lord grant his Royal Highness his life and our fleet better success…God in mercy continue our general and all our courages, and hope to ring them [the Dutch] a better peal than ever they heard, this being not inferior to any [battle] before’.

Wylde was entirely justified in praying for the Duke of York’s safety, for the hammering of the flagships inevitably led to a shocking attrition rate. In addition to Sandwich, the recently knighted Sir John Cox, the Duke of York’s flag captain on the Prince, was killed by a cannonball, while Sandwich’s opposite number, Van Ghent (who was killed by canister shot that shattered his torso and left leg) became the only senior Dutch officer who fell; he is commemorated by a large memorial in the Domkerk at Utrecht. As well as Cox and the Frenchmen Les Rabesnieres and Des Ardents,  five English captains were killed, the most notable being Francis Digby, son of the Earl of Bristol and one of the chief architects of the combined fleet, and Sir Frescheville Holles, the charismatic and swashbuckling one-armed cavalier who had clashed more than once with the rather more prim Samuel Pepys. One of the lieutenants who fell was the twenty-one-year-old Winston Churchill of the Fairfax; his elder brother John, who was attending the Duke of York aboard the Prince, survived the battle, and went on to command in many more glorious and successful engagements. Charles Harbord, son of the king’s Surveyor-General, and Charles Cottrell, son of his Master of Ceremonies, perished with Sandwich on the Royal James; last Thursday I was at a superb concert in Westminster Abbey, and from my seat in the nave I could see the grand memorial erected to the memory of the two young friends by Harbord’s father. Also among the dead was Colonel Richard Nicholls, another member of the Duke of York’s retinue, who had once played a not insignificant part in rewriting world history. In 1664 Nicholls had commanded the expedition that overran the small Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of a long and densely forested island off the American coast, and renamed it New York in honour of his patron. Nicholls’ body was taken back to his home town of Ampthill in Bedfordshire and interred beneath a monument capped by the Dutch cannonball that had killed him.

On the lower deck, men perished in their hundreds. Sandwich’s lieutenant, held as a prisoner on De Zeven Provincien, was appalled by the casualties at Solebay, telling De Ruyter that more had died by the afternoon than in all four days of the great battle of 1-4 June 1666. Over a thousand British sailors were killed (and almost half as many again died in the French squadron), including perhaps half of the crew of the Royal James; a contemporary Dutch list suggests that some 528 of their sailors perished. As usual in seventeenth century warfare, the flagships bore the brunt. The losses on the Royal James were exceptional and amply demonstrated the devastating consequences of a successful fireship attack (which were mercifully rare), but the other British flagship, the Prince, had about a hundred killed and wounded; however, the French Ruby, the last ship in the rear-admiral of the Blue’s division, had only three killed and four wounded. Similarly De Ruyter’s flagship Zeven Provincien had twenty-eight killed, a figure exceeded by only one ship in the Dutch fleet. Each bare statistic conceals individual tragedies. The deaths of just four ordinary seamen on the Victory left no fewer than twenty-one children fatherless in Midland villages far from the sea. William Williamson, boatswain of the St George, died of wounds received in the battle, leaving a widow and six children at Rochester. Soldiers fell alongside mariners. Thomas King of Charlton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, died aboard the Advice, Edward Bevan of Pembridge, Herefordshire, aboard the Royal James. Inevitably, some sought to exploit the relatively generous provision of royal rewards for the families of dead and wounded men: Daniel Vincent, ordinary seaman aboard the Victory at Solebay, who claimed that he had a wife and six children, was actually an unmarried man. Even officers jumped on the bandwagon. John Tooley, lieutenant of the Third Rate Edgar (who claimed to have six children when he actually had only two), the commander of a sloop and the captain of an infantry company were all on a list of 117 names that an Admiralty clerk triumphantly titled ‘The Cheates Discovered’.

On the day after the battle, 29 May, James summoned a council of his flag officers and decided to renew the engagement. After all, the date was auspicious: it was both the birthday of his brother the king and the anniversary of the Stuart Restoration, so the imperatives to re-engage and to win were particularly strong. The ‘bloody flag’ of defiance – the red flag at the main, the signal to engage – was hoisted, accompanied by ‘three shouts for joy, to see it flying and we so near the enemy’. According to Charles Wylde of the Bristol, James intended ‘by the assistance of the Almighty to have rung them [the Dutch] such a peal and played them such a game that they might have had occasion to have remembered all the Whitsuntides hereafter’. The planned attack was thwarted by the onset of both ‘a dark and thick fog’ and a gale so strong that it was impossible to run out the lower tier of guns on the flagship; night was also drawing on, and although the Dutch fleet was only half a mile away, the pursuit was abandoned. The strange weather of the twenty-ninth was the precursor of a particularly shocking summer, even by the standards of the ‘Little Ice Age’.  By the beginning of August, one of the Scots serving in the fleet (and who thus presumably had long personal experience of dire weather) could write to his country’s Lord Admiral, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, that ‘we have had a very tedious summer of it, never fleet having endured so much foul weather’. A week later, another of the duke’s correspondents reported to him that ‘the Dutch had traffic with their confederate the Old Gentleman (= Satan) in this affair, for nothing ever came so opportunely as these late storms for them’, while a third claimed that there had not been ‘three fair days together this ten weeks’. These comments are borne out by the objective evidence of the weather entries in ships’ logs and reports from both the fleet and coastal towns, all of which tell a sorry tale of violent storms alternating with dense fogs; as John Narbrough, the duke of York’s flag captain, put it on 27 July, ‘never such weather known in these seas at this time of year before now’. The damage to the fleet was so great that it withdrew to effect repairs, first at Bridlington Bay – where it spent much of August – and then to the Buoy of the Nore, where it arrived on the twenty-third, effectively ending the year’s campaign.

(To be concluded)