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London wreck 1665

Annus Mirabilis: Or, a Very Good Time for 17th Century Naval History

08/06/2015 by J D Davies

This is turning into something of an annus mirabilis for we few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters), who nail our tattered colours to the rickety mast of seventeenth century naval history.

Next month, on 4 July, there’s what promises to be a fascinating day at Hastings under the auspices of the splendid Shipwreck Museum there, devoted to the wreck of the warship Anne. This year is the 325th anniversary of the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, after which the Anne, a third rate and one of the ‘thirty new ships’ built for Charles II between 1677 and 1685, was driven ashore and burned. The wreck survives at Pett Level and is sometimes exposed at exceptionally low tides; I’ve blogged about her, and my visits to her, here and here. There’s a terrific line-up of expert speakers: Ann Coats, Richard Endsor, Peter Marsden and Robert Stone. Unfortunately, the day also features some idiot rambling inanely about Pepys’s Navy, and then reading the account by Frank Fox, avec la participation de Peter Le Fevre and Richard Endsor (as they say in French films), which provides a highly likely identification of the important and enigmatic Normans Bay wreck and which was originally published on this site.

Three weeks later, the National Maritime Museum is staging a major conference on Tudor and Stuart seafaring, which I’ll be going to. It’s a sign of how the study of naval and maritime history has broadened in the last 30 years or so that this includes topics as diverse as shipboard stress aboard early East India company ships, pirate executions, maritime law and state formation, women and the navy in the British civil wars, the cultural politics of early modern sea captains, and 17th century Scottish ship models. (Not a battle to be seen, as I’ve commented previously on this site.) This is a preliminary to the opening in November of a new exhibition about Samuel Pepys, itself a forerunner of the 400th anniversary of the Queen’s House next year and the subsequent opening of the NMM’s new permanent gallery on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The latter will apparently include some of the fantastic art and ship models of the period; if it’s half as good as the Nelson, Navy, Nation gallery that opened a couple of years back, I’ll be installing a camp bed and making it my permanent address.

On 4 and 5 September, at Portsmouth, the Ordnance Society is holding a conference on ‘Guns From the Sea’, although sadly, I won’t be able to get to that one. The programme looks absolutely fascinating, though, and contains a significant amount of seventeenth century interest. For example, there are papers on the ordnance of Louis XIV’s navy, and on some of the finds from the wreck of the London in the Thames estuary. The London, which blew up off Southend on 7 March 1665, was one of the great ships of both the Commonwealth and Restoration navies, and the wreck site has yielded, and continues to yield, a remarkable amount of valuable material. Moreover, its destruction provided me with a crucial scene in the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, although I used a fair amount of dramatic licence in order to get Samuel Pepys to the wreck site not long after the explosion took place!

Outside the realms of naval history, too, these are halcyon days for seventeenth century buffs in the UK. A new National Civil War Centre recently opened in Newark, and I hope to hack up the A1 to investigate it in the not too distant future. So on the back of all these terrific developments for UK-based fans of the seventeenth century, all we need is a major TV series to finally drive those pesky Tudors off our screens and provide us with a Stuart version of Poldark.

Hmm.

As it happens, I can think of a suitable series of books with lots of action and intrigue, with a handsome young hero who takes his shirt off from time to time…

Filed Under: Historical research, Maritime history, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Anne wreck, Hastings, HMS Anne, London wreck 1665, National Maritime Museum, ordnance society

#2ADW350

05/01/2015 by J D Davies

Happy New Year to all!

2015 already, though…? I’m increasingly convinced that I fell through a worm hole in the space-time continuum in about 1976 and have largely lost track of things ever since. But then, I have a sneaking feeling that many of my friends, and my ex-students in particular, have suspected that all along!

Anyway, regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve made a number of pleas for the current wave of major anniversaries – notably of World War I, Magna Carta and Waterloo – not to completely overwhelm and obscure other important commemorations. Above all, I’ve made the case for remembering the 350th anniversaries of the events of the second Anglo-Dutch war of 1665-7, a period I’ve studied for over 30 years and which now forms the backdrop to my series of historical fiction, the Journals of Matthew Quinton. Although I’ve no doubt that the ‘headline’ events of that period, notably the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, will be given due recognition (indeed, we’ve already endured a pretty dreadful TV dramatisation of the latter), and the English acquisition of New Amsterdam / New York before the war officially began already has been, I wonder if the same will be true of the naval events of the war. Of course, I’m talking here from an exclusively British perspective: it’s a racing certainty that the naval anniversaries will be commemorated amply in the Netherlands, where they’re counted among the great triumphs of the country’s ‘golden age’. If you need further proof, the premiere of the new Dutch blockbuster movie Michiel De Ruyter at the Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam on the 29th of this month should provide it.

(By way of digression, when was the last time Britain made a movie about any naval hero, even Nelson? And no, the fictitious Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander doesn’t count, nor does Clive Owen’s bizarre turn as Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabeth: the Golden Age!)

It has to be said, the omens aren’t good. For example, English Heritage’s list of the ten most important anniversaries of 2015 omits the war entirely – and, indeed, also consigns to oblivion the Jacobite rising of 1715 (before you try the ‘but it was entirely Scottish’ cop-out excuse, English Heritage, no, it most certainly wasn’t…). However, said list does include, umm, the 700th anniversary of the siege of Carlisle. That being the case, it didn’t take too much thought on my part to realise that my pleas for proper recognition of the forthcoming 350th anniversaries had a logical consequence: namely, “if not me, who”? So as of 1 January, I’ve started tweeting the anniversaries as they happen. I don’t mean just the big events, like the destruction of the London on 7 March or the battle of Lowestoft on 3 June; I’m also tweeting about relatively small occurrences, or examples of bigger themes, to try and give as full a picture of the war as it’s possible to develop in 140 characters at a time. The title of this blog post is the hashtag that I’m using, and that I’ll continue to use until the end of the war in 1667/2017 (failure to drop off perch in the interim permitting). If you’re not on Twitter, you should still be able to follow my tweets in the feed to the right of this post. Naturally, I’ll be giving due attention to the really big anniversaries in this blog as well, and over the course of the next few months I’ll also be providing more information about the forthcoming Quinton novel, The Rage of Fortune, a prequel focusing on Matthew’s eponymous grandfather during the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s titanic naval war against Spain. Oh, and I expect there’ll be the odd rant and complete digression along the way, as I hope you’ve come to expect from these posts. So welcome to 2015, and to #2ADW350!

Filed Under: Maritime history, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: London wreck 1665, Michiel De Ruyter, Second Anglo-Dutch War

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