J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

london wreck

Other South American Rivers are Available

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I don’t usually plug other people’s books on this site, but occasionally, titles come along that really deserve a bit of a leg-up – especially if they fall within my usual very strict and narrow remits (i.e. seventeenth century, naval, seventeenth century naval, or absolutely anything else whatsoever that interests me), and/or if their publishers are slightly off the beaten track, and/or if I’ve got some sort of personal connection with them. Next week, for example, I’m hoping to have a guest post that fits several of these bills – watch this space – but this week, I thought I’d highlight some titles that can be found in the ‘available for pre-order’ categories of the proverbial tax-lite South American river, plus one that’s just come out.

The first is the intriguingly titled Lawson Lies Still in the Thames, by Gill Blanchard, being published by Amberley in May. This is a biography of one of the most intriguing admirals of the seventeenth century, Sir John Lawson, who moved from being an out-and-out radical under the Commonwealth to become a knight of the realm and staunch supporter of the restored monarchy. I’ve been interested in Lawson since I was working on my doctorate over thirty years ago, and he appears as a character in the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears the Skies. He was also the captain of the London, but wasn’t aboard when the ship accidentally blew up in the Thames in March 1665. I’ve blogged before on this site about the wreck of the London, and a lot more work has been done on the wreck since then, so having this book in print will be a big boost to those who are diving on and researching the site. I’ve exchanged emails with the author about aspects of Lawson’s career, and know that Gill has unearthed some previously unknown documents about her subjects, so I’m really intrigued to see what she says about this absolutely fascinating and historically important individual.

My next pick is Resolution: Two Brothers, A Nation in Crisis, A World at War, by David Rutland and Emma Ellis, being published by Head of Zeus in April. If you’re thinking that you’ve never come across Rutland as a surname, you’d probably be right; but the author in question is actually David, Duke of Rutland, and this is the story of one of his family members, an almost exact contemporary of Nelson (and son of the Marquess of Granby, of multiple pub names fame), who died at the age of just twenty-four. If you think Captain Lord Robert Manners sounds a bit insignificant to deserve an entire book, his contemporaries would have begged to differ. These days, one enters Westminster Abbey by the north transept, and pretty much the first thing you see is an unbelievably colossal baroque monument to Manners and the two colleagues who fell with him. I’ve talked to the authors about naval history on several occasions, supplied some research information for the book, and did some critical reading of drafts, so I know that this is going to be a really worthwhile and very readable study, drawing on the superb archives at Belvoir Castle and many other sources.

My final choice in the ‘forthcoming’ category has already been covered on this site, in a guest post from the author himself – so this is a gentle reminder to anyone who hasn’t ordered it yet that Richard Endsor’s book on The Warship Anne is being published in less than a fortnight’s time! The launch party took place at the wonderful Shipwreck Museum in Hastings last weekend; sadly, I couldn’t attend, but there are unconfirmed reports that the author is safe and well, and wasn’t led astray by the ‘usual suspects’ from the nefarious world of nautical archaeology.

And last of all, a book that’s just come out, and which I’ve just finished reading – Jacqueline Reiter’s The Late Lord: The Life of John Pitt, second Earl of Chatham. By coincidence, there’s a connection between this and Resolution, described above: the fourth Duke of Rutland, the second brother covered in that book, was one of Chatham’s closest friends. This is another case where I have to put my hands up and admit that I know the author, but this is a beautifully written, exceptionally well researched, insightful, and very balanced, analysis of the career of a man whose peculiar misfortune was to be the son and brother of far greater men, William Pitt the Elder and Younger. (Note: at this point, do not, under any circumstances, follow this link.) It’s particularly revealing about the controversial Walcheren expedition of 1809, which effectively wrecked Chatham’s career – and for a seventeenth century naval buff, it was fascinating to come across very familiar placenames that are so absolutely central to my own work, such as Vlissingen/Flushing, Middelburg, and Veere (Cornelia Quinton’s home town in ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’).

Generally, though, my reading is on the back burner at the moment, which is always the case when I’m writing a new book. But the good news is that the next Quinton novel, The Devil Upon the Wave – set against the backdrop of the Dutch attack on the Medway, 350 years ago this June – is well on course, and should be finished quite soon! More updates as and when available.

 

1665: The First Blast

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The new Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, is set against the dramatic events of the year 1665. This is one of the few dates in British history that most schoolchildren allegedly still know, but its prominence is due principally to the dreadful outbreak of plague that swept through London that summer – and from my own teaching experience over many years, I know that few things go down as well with twelve year old pupils as grizzly descriptions of plague symptoms and the often bizarre ‘preventatives’ that were adopted at the time. The plague does provide part of the backdrop to The Blast, but the book’s main focus is the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war, which was proclaimed in London on 4 March, and the main narrative runs from that time to the climactic Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, one of the great epics of the age of sail (and which I’ll describe more fully in a subsequent post).

The year 1665 began with a natural phenomenon that was taken by many at the time as a sign of great and terrible things to come. In November 1664 a comet appeared in the skies, remaining visible until March; a second comet was seen in April, although for the purposes of the novel, I’ve conflated these into one. Pepys first noted it on 15 December 1664: ‘so to the Coffee-House, where great talk of the Comett seen in several places and among our men at sea and by my Lord Sandwich, to whom I intend to write about it tonight’. Sandwich’s journal, published by the Navy Records Society in 1929, records that he had first seen the comet on the eleventh. On the seventeenth he recorded this description:

This morning about 3 o’clock I saw the Blazing Star again in the main topsail of the Argo Navis, distant from the Great Dog – 29o35′, the Scorpion’s Heart – 26o. The bodyof the star was dusky, not plain to see figures or dimensions, but seemed 4 or 5 times bigger than the Great Dog, of a more red colour than Mars. The tail of him streamed in the fashion of a birchen besom towards the Little Dog the one half of the distance between them.

Sandwich, commanding the fleet in the Channel, made regular observations of the comet throughout the winter. Pepys records frequent sightings of it and that the King and Queen sat up one night to watch it. The more credulous took it as an omen, and the first apparent proof of their dire predictions came on 7 March 1665, just three days after war had been declared, when the great ship London, a powerful Second Rate man-of-war mounting 76 guns, suddenly blew up in the Hope, a stretch of water in the Thames estuary. She was intended to be the flagship of Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red squadron, in the forthcoming naval campaign against the Dutch. Not all of her men were aboard, but a significant number of women were – wives, girlfriends and perhaps some rather less formal companions. Over three hundred were killed, although a small number survived because, miraculously, the roundhouse at the stern was untouched by the blast and remained above water.

Built at Chatham and launched in 1656, the London was an impressive ship which had served in the blockade of Dunkirk in 1658 and in the Baltic in 1659. At the Restoration, she was part of the fleet that went to Scheveningen to bring back the royal family; the new Lord High Admiral James, Duke of York, the future King James II & VII, was embarked in her. In 1665 she was armed entirely with brass guns, some of which had been made by a gunfounder coincidentally named Henry Quintyn. The cause of the explosion remains unclear, but both at the time and since, the principal concern was with the loss of so many valuable brass guns. Salvage attempts began almost immediately and some guns were brought up, but the great majority remained on the sea bed. The wreck of the London has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Several TV programmes have been made about it – I took part in the filming of one of them, a short item for BBC’s The One Show, last summer with Dan Snow – and these have inevitably made much of the fact that so many women were aboard the ship when she blew up, although this was not uncommon in the Restoration period. Additionally, the questionable legality of some recent salvages of guns from her has attracted the attention of the authorities. What is likely to become the definitive study of the reasons for the loss of the London and the fate of her guns has been written by my friend and colleague Frank Fox, author of the outstanding The Four Days Battle, 1666 (the setting for the forthcoming ‘Quinton 5’!), and will be published later this year in volume 8 of the Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society.

The destruction of the London forms the basis of a chapter in The Blast That Tears The Skies. No spoilers, though – I won’t reveal how Matthew Quinton becomes involved, nor the identity of the distinctly unlikely partner who accompanies him during this particular episode! And the London is only the first of the sky-tearing blasts that give the book its title…