J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Medway 350

The Devil Upon the Wave – Teaser Trailer

by

To mark the publication by Endeavour Press of the new Quinton title, The Devil Upon the Wave, I’m delighted to provide a treat for my loyal readers and followers of this blog – namely, the first few pages of the book.

***

Here, Painter, let thine art describe a story,

Shaming our warlike island’s ancient glory:

A scene which never on our seas appear’d,

Since our first ships were on the ocean steer’d.

Make the Dutch fleet, while we supinely sleep,

Without opposers, masters of the deep.

 

Anon., Fourth Advice to a Painter (1667)

 

*

‘By God,’ says he, ‘I think the Devil shits Dutchmen.’

 

Sir William Batten, Surveyor of the Navy; words reported by Samuel Pepys in his diary, 19 July 1667

 

 

PROLOGUE

The Gunfleet Anchorage

October 1671

 

‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’

Tom Butler, who uttered these words, did not look like a religious man. The pursed lips, formed into a permanent kiss, and the grey bags beneath his eyes gave him the look of a libertine; and, every now and again, if the fancy took him, that was what Tom Butler was, sometimes for months at a time. In faith, then, he was not really a religious man at all. But his pronouncement as we stood at the stern, watched the men on the yard unfurling the main course of the Elsinore Merchant to catch the strengthening south-westerly breeze, was as solemn as any by a bishop. It led me to wonder which lord he meant: the Lord on high, or the lord who stood before me. Religious he might not be, but a lord Tom most certainly was, despite the rough seaman’s shirt and breeches that he and I both wore as disguise. Indeed, one day, if God willed it, he would rule an entire kingdom. For Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, was son and heir to the Duke of Ormonde, the vice-king of Ireland.

Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, by Sir Peter Lely (National Portrait Gallery)

‘A fair wind for it, Matt. A fine breeze to carry us over to avenge England’s greatest shame. Just as they had a fine, fair breeze for it four years ago.’

‘Amen to that, My Lord Ossory.’

I looked out over the waist of our ship. To all but the very keenest observer, she would appear an innocent flyboat, a merchantman with her course set for Rotterdam. Yet that one solitary keenest observer might note that by the standards of innocent merchantmen, her crew were somewhat brisk. The course was sheeted home a little too efficiently, the ship’s head steered a little too precisely. The crew on deck was distinctly large by the standards of any such innocent merchantman, making a voyage to Rotterdam; and that was without counting the two hundred soldiers and seamen concealed in the hold. True, the Elsinore Merchant was as low in the water as a ship notionally carrying a cargo of salt from Maldon could be expected to be. But she carried no salt: instead, her commodious hold also contained enough weaponry and ammunition to sustain a small army, and a full set of canvas, enough to outfit one of the largest men-of-war in the world.

‘You still think it’s an insane scheme, Matt?’

My Lord of Ossory knew me too well. We had known each other for years, since the days when we were both penniless exiles in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. We had both married Dutch women; and, if anything, our wives were even better friends to each other than we were.

‘Then why am I here, Tom?’

‘Ah, well, Matt Quinton, there’s the rub. Why are you here? This was my insanity, God help me – mine alone. To bring her back to the haven from which she was taken. To bring her back in triumph. To avenge the humiliation. To redeem England. To exculpate our king. My idea. My folly. If God so wills it, my death. But why are you here, Matt?’

I looked out. To larboard, the low, featureless shores of Essex and Suffolk were beginning to recede behind us. To starboard, there was only the gently swelling sea, dotted with some small hoys, flyboats and ketches, under a grey spring sky. A sea that led to the mouth of the Maas, and the harbour of Rotterdam, where the Elsinore Merchant was notionally bound. But to reach Rotterdam, the ship would have to pass through the haven of Hellevoetsluis: or, as English seamen knew it, Hell-vote-slice. That harbour contained many ships, but only one of them mattered to Englishmen. Only one ship burned a word into English hearts, just as Calais was said to have been burned into the heart of Bloody Mary.

And that word was:

Chatham.

I smiled. ‘You know the reason, Tom. You were in Ireland, but I was there.’

Yes, I was there. I could still remember the heat on my face from our burning ships. I could recall the shame I felt at the sight of the Dutch flag flying proud from the ramparts of Sheerness fort. I remembered the brutal humiliation that our country had suffered. That I had suffered: the very personal crosses which I bore from that fateful summer of 1667. And that was why I sailed with Tom Butler now, on a scheme so insane, so suicidal, that any man of reason would have rightly decried it as the brainchild of lunatics.

Our collective madness began in high summer, some three months earlier, almost exactly four years after the catastrophe at Chatham, in a high room: a dark, stifling chamber in the round tower of Windsor Castle, atop its vast, overgrown mound, the Thames and Eton College just visible through smears in the grime caking the tiny windows. For some unaccountable reason, the king was thinking of making Windsor his permanent summer residence, rather than doing what any rational man would have done, namely, deciding it was better to stay in Whitehall after all and tearing down the entire rotting pile.

Windsor Castle in 1670

Tom Butler and I were standing over a table, looking down upon a chart of the mouth of the river the Dutch called the Maas. Across the table from us stood a tall, dark, ugly man wearing a simple shirt and a large black wig. If anything, Charles Stuart, King of England, was scrutinising the chart even more intently than we were.

‘There are almost no guards, Majesty,’ said Tom. ‘A few elderly marines. Some ship-keepers. No more. And of course, the Dutch will not be expecting such an assault.’

‘But they will still have men-of-war in the roadstead,’ I protested.

‘A thirty-gunner or two, perhaps,’ said Tom, confidently. And only one thirty–gunner will be more than sufficient to blow us out of the water, I thought. ‘That’s what our intelligencers suggest. Otherwise, their fleet will be laid up for the winter. What ships they’ll have in commission will be far to the north, at Texel and the Helder.’

I thought of objecting, but the king nodded vigorously, and I knew better than to challenge the royal nod. Yet this was strange. Indeed, it was strange beyond measure. Charles the Second, normally the most practical and sceptical of men, was not raising the objections that jostled within my head, each squabbling for precedence over the other. Objections that would usually have issued from his royal mouth, long before they reached mine.

Charles II by Mary Beale, 1670

‘You could rig her within an hour, while holding off the Rotterdam militia?’ said the king.

‘Jury rig only, Majesty, but enough to get her out into the roadstead. Then, a simple matter to take her out as far as our escorts. If you give us a brace of fourth rates, that is.’

‘But—’ I began.

‘The day will be chosen carefully,’ said Tom. ‘A spring tide. Sufficient for even her great draught.’

‘But the wind, Tom,’ I said. ‘All depends on an easterly, or a northerly, in that roadstead.’

And there, of course, was the great, terrible flaw in Tom Butler’s plan. It may be that the Dutch would be unsuspecting enough to believe that the King of England would not attempt such a thing. It may be that the defences were as weak as Tom believed them to be. It may be that we could erect jury rig in an hour. It may be that only a hundred or so men would be able to take to sea a ship usually crewed by eight hundred. It may be that the tide would be right. It may be that a million angels could dance on the head of a pin.

But nothing on this earth could determine the wind.

I looked at the king. I had known Charles Stuart for many years now, and knew him as most men did: the arch-cynic, the libertine, the fornicator. I also knew him as a consummate seaman, who could handle a helm as well as any pilot, and design a hull as well as any master shipwright. I knew the other Charles Stuart too, the one that fewer men saw, the brutal, vicious, amoral creature that would readily destroy hundreds of lives with the stroke of a pen. But I did not know the Charles Stuart who spoke now.

‘We shall trust in God,’ said the king, with the simple, unarguable finality of a martyr on the way to the stake.

That unsettling certainty, that uncharacteristic display of faith from the least religious monarch ever to occupy the throne of England, won over even me, Matthew Quinton, brother and heir of the Earl of Ravensden, scion of a family that, with only a very few exceptions, had never been noted for its piety. And that was how I came to be standing on the deck of the Elsinore Merchant with my old friend Tom Butler, Earl of Ossory, bound for the Dutch coast, there to board, seize, and bring back to England, one ship, thereby most certainly triggering immediate war between the two countries.

But this was not just any ship. It was one of the greatest ships of all, which was towed away from Chatham four years before, in the most abject defeat the English crown had ever suffered.

So although I did not quite know why, I knew that I would fight, and if necessary die, for this most impossible of causes: to bring back our king’s flagship, towed out of the Medway by the Dutch, to England’s eternal shame.

We would rescue the Royal Charles, and redeem our country.

 

So just what ‘very personal crosses’ does Matt Quinton bear from the summer of 1667? And what befalls the desperate mission to retrieve the Royal Charles? You’ll have to get hold of a copy of The Devil Upon the Wave to find out!

 

The Royal Charles at Hellevoetsluis in 1672, by Abraham Storck

Amsterdam Good Time, Part 2

by

Conferences are often opportunities to meet old friends and make new ones, and that was certainly true of last weekend’s conference in Amsterdam to mark the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway. I caught up with several people I hadn’t seen for ages, finally met some of my Dutch Twitter followers in person, and was greatly impressed by the Vrienden van de Witt, who provided much of the organisational groundwork and most of the audience, not to mention a really warm and genuine welcome, epitomised by the outstanding (and outstandingly generous) dinners provided on the two evenings. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve become Vrienden indeed!

The Scheepvaartmuseum (national maritime museum) in Amsterdam, venue for conference drinks; the main proceedings took place in the Marine Etablissement, the naval base behind the museum (i.e. to the left of it in this picture)

Ultimately, though, any conference stands or falls on the strength of its programme, and this one certainly ticked that box. After the opening formalities, David Onnekink of Utrecht University provided an impressive overview of Anglo-Dutch relations through the seventeenth century, showing the progression from uneasy alliance to open hostility, and using a number of sources that were relatively unfamiliar to the Brits in the audience – such as Joost van der Vondel, the ‘Dutch Shakespeare. The first dual-speaker session saw Marc van Alphen, of the Netherlands Institute for Military History, discuss pay and morale among the seamen of the two navies, while Richard Blakemore of Reading University provided a lively overview of the development of the Stuart navy. (Richard was the only British speaker to display any sort of command of Dutch, which was well received by the audience – although all of the Dutch speakers, and the Dutch members of the audience, had no problem with proceedings that were otherwise conducted entirely in English. This remarkable level of easy fluency never ceases to impress me whenever I’m in the Netherlands, and, indeed, in Scandinavia too.) The second keynote came from Professor Henk den Heijer of Leiden University, who talked about the Asiatic and Atlantic dimensions of the second Anglo-Dutch war. This was followed by talks on the respective countries’ dockyards from Alan Lemmers of the NIMH and Ann Coats of Portsmouth University, chair of the Naval Dockyards Society, the other co-organisers of the conference. These talks brought out the important differences between the two systems, with the Dutch yards being much more integrated into their wider communities and mercantile networks.

The second day began with a keynote from Dr Louis Sicking of Leiden University, who provided a broad overview of early modern naval tactics and technology, including the adoption of the line-of-battle tactic by both navies. Erik Odegard of Leiden University then looked at Dutch amphibious tactics and the actual events of the Chatham raid (as well as pointing out just how insignificant most of the ships lost at Chatham actually were, a point that I also covered), while Philip MacDougall from the NDS spoke on the defence responses to the raid, notably the new fortifications built from the late 1660s onwards in the Thames and Medway, at Portsmouth, and at Plymouth. Then came what Ann Coats cheekily described as ‘the terrible two’ – Gijs Rommelse talking about Chatham as Johan de Witt’s finest hour, and yours truly lobbing in a few more revisionist grenades in an assessment of the political and ideological ramifications of the raid for the Stuart monarchy. My contention that in mid-June 1667 the raid was much less important to the Stuarts than the death of the duke of Cambridge, the second in line to the throne, led to a few raised eyebrows, but I escaped relatively lightly during the Q&A, whereas Gijs had to defend against a spirited denunciation of his definition of ‘republicans’ in the Dutch state from no less than Professor Jaap Bruijn, one of the legends of Dutch maritime studies. (Jaap still looks exactly the same as he did when I first met him thirty years ago, so I want some of whatever he’s having.)

One of the images presented by Remmelt Daalder

The absence due to family issues of Chris Ware of the Greenwich Maritime Centre meant that Remmelt Daalder of the Netherlands National Maritime Museum had the next session to himself, and he presented a fascinating overview of how de Ruyter’s legacy had been shaped and often distorted for political ends in the 350 years since the raid – most chillingly, in his adoption by the Nazis as a propaganda symbol to encourage the Dutch to fight alongside the Germans against the British. Finally, the conference was closed by Professor John Hattendorf of the US Naval War College, who provided a characteristically concise but penetrating analysis of the talks and the overall themes of the two days. John suggested that the constant references to the raid as a ‘humiliation’ were a bit too glib, and that the real humiliation for Charles II was the failure to set out a fleet in the first place – a moot point, perhaps, but a suitably thought-provoking way of closing the conference.

A ‘sequel’, with many of the same speakers and delegates, is taking place at the University of Kent’s Chatham campus this weekend, but personal circumstances mean I can no longer go to that – a great pity, as it would be terrific to keep the party going! But the good news is that many of the papers from the two conferences are likely to be combined into a single book, which should be an absolute must for everyone with an interest in seventeenth century naval history and/or Anglo-Dutch relations. For my part, I’ll retain many happy memories of a glorious weekend in Amsterdam. And it’s only five years to the 350th anniversary of the start of the third Anglo-Dutch war…but I’ll definitely be back long before then!!

Amsterdam Good Time, Part 1

by

And so it continued. Not content with fireworks, rowing contests, schoolchildren’s chain-making competitions, and exhibitions galore, it was finally time for the historians to have their four-penn’orth about the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Medway, which was why I spent last weekend in Amsterdam, attending a conference jointly organised by the Naval Dockyards Society and the Vrienden van de Witt.

Marginally too large to smuggle aboard the Eurostar

In truth, I don’t need much persuading if a trip to Amsterdam is in the offing. I’ve loved the place since I first went there, well over thirty years ago, when I was working on my doctorate. I knew I could hardly work on seventeenth century naval history without seeing things from the Dutch side, so I swiftly became well acquainted with the Rijksmuseum, the Scheepvaartmuseum (the Dutch national maritime museum), and the great churches, not to mention many rather less renowned landmarks. One of these was a little bar which floated my boat for some unfathomable reason, and to which I return every time I’m in Amsterdam, including this one. It’s nothing special – indeed, in some respects, it’s a bit insalubrious – and it hasn’t actually changed at all in the thirty plus years since I first went there (possibly one of the reasons why I like it), but it’s very central, never particularly full, and always seems to be playing exactly the music I like, i.e. almost nothing written since The End of Music, which, of course, took place in approximately 1990. And no, I’m not going to tell you what it’s called or where it is, in case you all start going there. But it provides a haven for a breather between my regular destinations, which on this trip, included the likes of the Rijksmuseum, the Oude and Nieuwe Kerks, and the Kok secondhand bookshop, plus a new discovery, the wonderful ‘secret’ Catholic church of Our Lord in the Attic.

Turner Prize? More like the Turnip Prize, IMHO

(The visit to the Oude Kerk was a bit frustrating, largely because it currently contains what has to be one of the daftest ‘modern art’ installations I’ve ever encountered – and there’s a lot of competition for that title, says Mr Grumpy Old Man. This one consists of what are essentially large rectangles of gold wrapping paper laid out over the floor, thus obscuring many of the fascinating grave slabs and forcing visitors to play a game of human chess, i.e. having to move to the right or left if someone else is approaching along the same vertical line.)

I’d not been to the Rijksmuseum since its huge refurbishment some five years ago, and was duly impressed by the new look. But like all great international museums, visiting it is still a slightly frenetic experience, thanks principally to the vast tour parties on their ‘see the Rijksmuseum in five minutes’ excursions – and invariably, that means setting up a colossal siege line in front of The Night Watch. However, that’s only marginally less hectic than the rest of the floor devoted to the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, the seventeenth century, which unfortunately includes the naval displays, my principal target. Still, most tourists are significantly smaller than me, and only relatively few needed to be hospitalised as I manoeuvred myself into poll position in front of the glorious works of art by the van de Veldes et al. However, I’m not sure that the Rijksmuseum refurbishment has been kind to the naval material. The sternpiece of the captured Royal Charles, for example, now hangs above a door, and it’s not possible to get as close to it as it was in the old incarnation, where it was alongside a mezzanine. But otherwise, it’s still possible to wander through huge swathes of the museum, including, for example, the ship models room, and encounter very few people, while of course, I’m not going to complain too much about any national museum that devotes an appropriate amount of space to naval history. (Are you listening, British Museum?)

‘Ninety-nine!’ (This caption is respectfully dedicated to all members of the 1974 British Lions touring party)

***

Tomorrow, I’ll blog about the conference programme itself. There was one massive timing glitch during it, though – but it most certainly wasn’t the fault of the organisers. When I sat down after giving my paper, I checked my emails, and came across a piece of information that I wish I’d known about earlier, so I could impart it to the audience. (OK, yes, that’s an euphemism for ‘indulging in shameless self-publicity’.) This was the news that the new Quinton novel, The Devil Upon the Wave, had become available on Amazon that very afternoon. Naturally, the book focuses heavily on the Dutch attack on the Medway, but it also places Matthew among the defenders of Landguard Fort as they try to beat off yet another Dutch onslaught, and also takes him to sea, albeit this time aboard the Dutch fleet, where he confronts a terrible dilemma and a huge personal tragedy. Several real historical characters make ‘cameo appearances’, among them King Charles II, Samuel Pepys, and Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, while fans of the broader Quinton family may welcome the return of the enigmatic Uncle Tris, Matt’s outspoken elder sister Elizabeth, his dour Dutch brother-in-law Cornelis, and, of course, his feisty wife Cornelia. As a special treat and ‘teaser trailer’, next Monday’s post on this site will provide a free preview of Chapter One – and for a book set against the backdrop of the events of 1667, it’s most definitely not what you’re going to expect!

I’m a Doctor – Why Can’t I have a Tardis?

by

What, you mean doctorates in History don’t count?

But a Tardis would have been very useful over the weekend, when I was in Portsmouth for the AGM of the Society for Nautical Research, followed by a splendid dinner on the lower gundeck of HMS Victory, but I’d also have loved to be in Chatham for ‘Medway in Flames’, the culmination of the commemorative events (on this side of the North Sea, at any rate) for the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway. Bilocation, or at least, being able to make quick temporal jumps back and forth between Portsmouth and Medway via a Tardis, would have been very useful indeed. Fortunately, though, thanks to the joys of the interweb, I’ve been able to catch up on the shenanigans in Kent via local news and the council’s live stream of the event. It looks very jolly, but would it have been preferable to quaffing Pimms on the quarterdeck of Victory? Now there’s a conundrum for a Time Lord to address.

The manic June continues, though, and on Thursday I’ll be hopping on the Eurostar, bound for Amsterdam, for the conference on the Dutch raid organised jointly by the UK’s Naval Dockyards Society and the Dutch Vrienden van de Witt. I’m looking forward to catching up with lots of Dutch friends, and to giving my paper on the political and ideological implications of the raid for the Stuart monarchy! I hope to be able to blog about the conference next Monday, but that might prove to be a bit optimistic given the schedule for the weekend, so there might be a delay of a day or two.

***

Meanwhile, multiple good news for all Quintonistas! The new title, The Devil Upon the Wave, will be published by Endeavour Press before the end of the month, initially as an e-book but also available in short order on print-on-demand. Apologies for the slight delay, as I’d hoped it would be out before the main Medway events, but I hope you’ll agree it’s worth the short wait – the main action is set against the backdrop of the Dutch attacks on the Medway, and then the subsequent assault on Landguard Fort at Felixstowe. As well as featuring most of the regular series characters, there are also ‘guest appearances’ from the likes of King Charles II, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, and, yes, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter.

Endeavour will also be bringing out the first Quinton omnibus – a special e-book edition of the first three titles in the series, Gentleman Captain, The Mountain of Gold and The Blast That Tears the Skies. So all your summer holiday reading requirements are sorted!

 

Medway 350, Day 4

by

Inevitably and naturally, Sunday was the day for a little more solemnity; certainly rather more solemnity than that provided by the hijacker of yesterday’s post, the scurrilous shade of Samuel Pepys himself.

Above all, the day featured a service at Rochester Cathedral to mark the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway. For those of you who don’t know Rochester, it’s not the grandest cathedral in the British Isles. In architectural terms, indeed, it’s not in the same league as the likes of, say, Wells, Lincoln or Ely, and suffers from a bit too much input from George Gilbert Scott. It’s also literally overshadowed by the immediately adjacent castle, the keep of which still towers over it, and which was the scene of one of the most remarkable and brutal sieges in the entire history of warfare – brilliantly described by my author chum Angus Donald in his The Death of Robin Hood, and rather less brilliantly in the ludicrous film Ironclad.

But Rochester Cathedral makes up in spades for all of this by the sheer weight of history contained within its ancient walls. It’s the second oldest cathedral in the British Isles, and Christian worship has taken place continuously there since 604 AD, which isn’t just ‘older than the USA’, the usual barb that we historically smug (or, alternatively, overburdened) Brits deploy against our cousins across the pond. but significantly older than England itself, too. Dickens knew it well, and based several scenes in its environs. (Indeed, the weekend also coincided with Rochester’s annual Dickens festival, which meant that several of those attending the service were in splendid Victorian garb.) The cathedral also has many connections with my own field of interest – in 1673, the French Huguenot admiral, des Rabesnières, was buried there after being killed while leading his fleet’s rear division in the Battle of Solebay, while a slab in the nave commemorates Captain Christopher Fogge, who died in command of the Third Rate Rupert in 1708, and other naval memorials, including the ship’s bell of a previous HMS Kent, can be found throughout the building.

This, then, was the setting for the service, which also marked the formal ‘seating’ of the new Mayor of Medway in his designated place in the cathedral quire. At first, I thought that doubling up the mayoral installation and the Medway commemoration was a bit inappropriate, but as the service unfolded, it became clear – to me, at least – that it was anything but. For one thing, the frankly ludicrous mayoral garb, complete with red robes, chain, and tricorn hat (not to mention the mace and its bearer, a kind of Kentish version of Black Rod) gave the proceedings an air of history that no amount of modern-day naval dress uniform and ‘men in suits’ (or even ‘women in crinoline’) could possibly provide, while the fact that the Mayor of Medway is also, for goodness sake, ‘Governor of Rochester Castle and Admiral of the River’, presumably in succession to the former Mayors of Rochester, and has been exercising the right to be installed in the cathedral since 1448, gave the whole proceedings a sense of historical continuity that stretched back a long way before the Dutch attack. Anthems with music composed by Daniel Purcell, the less famous brother of Henry, gave another sense of the seventeenth century, as did the entire order of service – the key elements, and most of the words, of the Anglican evensong service would have been very familiar to those who tried to defend Chatham in 1667, although they might well have baulked at the notion of the Old Testament lesson being read by the Dutch ambassador.

Today, though, it’s back home, to normality; or, in other words, there’s a lawn in Bedfordshire that needs mowing. Part of me wishes I could be back in Medway next weekend for its ‘Medway in Flames’ event, a spectacular show promised for Saturday evening. Instead, I’ll be in Portsmouth, attending, and presenting a report at, the AGM of the Society for Nautical Research.

***

Cockham Wood fort

Finally, though, and by way of a slight – but by no means complete – digression, I thought I’d mention two more naval history ‘memorials’, of very different kinds, that I visited during my stay in Medway. One is Cockham Wood Fort, a direct consequence of the Dutch attack – built in 1669, it was one of several new fortifications built along the river to ensure that such a disaster could never occur again. But the relentless power of several centuries of tides has very nearly done for it; large chunks of fallen brickwork lie in front of the surviving structure of the lower battery, and it seems probable that a few more decades will completely obliterate the remains of the fort.

The other memorial is the huge memorial to the men of the Royal Navy’s Chatham Division who were killed during both World Wars. Identical in pattern to the memorials at Portsmouth and Plymouth, this one stands in a very different location, high on the hill overlooking Chatham and Rochester. While this makes it much more prominent than either of its siblings, the distance from built-up, and thus more easily policed, areas means that it has been a target for vandals, to the extent that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission now only opens it between 8.30 and 5.00 – and when I went there, it wasn’t open at all. In one sense, this wasn’t a major issue for me, as I’d visited it before, but the principle of having to restrict access to such a hugely important part of Britain’s naval heritage is a depressing comment on some of the worst traits of modern society.

This much I know, though: every single name inscribed on the Chatham memorial is worth a thousand or more of the vacuous pondlife who find it entertaining to deface it.

 

Medway 350, Day 3

by

(With an affectionate nod toward Samuel Pepys, esquire, sometime Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, sometime Secretary to the Admiralty, sometime President of the Royal Society, sometime Master of Trinity House, sometime serial bonker)

 

Up betimes, and to ye dockyard at Chatham, where I enquired where I might find Pett.

‘No pets allowed,’ said ye churl manning ye incredibly sophisticated digital security system.

Thus discouraged, I moved on to discover ye dockyard full of ye Dutch, for some unfathomable reason. Many were adherents of ye fanatic religious sect, ye Yachties, and were thus best avoided. Hence to ye bookshoppe, to discover that there were no books about me – no Bryant, no Ollard, not even ye brazen wench Tomalin. But it had ye booke on de Ruyter, ye Dutch admiral, called (with ye ingenuity customary to ye publishing trade) De Ruyter: Dutch Admiral, which has a chapter on British perceptions of said valiant warrior by a gallant young Welchman of mine acquaintance; and ye new edition of ye esteemed and venerable book, Ye Dutch in Ye Medway, with a new introduction by ye same and definitely still young – well, relatively young – Welchman.

And so to ye quayside, to watch ye Dutch Marines row directly at ye chain! What a formidable obstacle! What an unbreachable barrier! Surely no impudent gaggle of Hollanders could break –

Oh.

And lo, I didst feel ye most powerful sense of what ye French call ‘ye deja vu‘.

Discouraged by this spectacle, I took to ye water on a boat full of yet more Netherlandish Yachties, intending to inspect ye defences of ye Medway. But ye mighty batteries intended for St Mary’s Island and thereabouts seem to have been supplanted by things called an ‘M&S factory outlet’ and an ‘Odeon multiplex’, the latter claiming to show plays featuring flat actors, and bearing such titles as ‘Wonder Woman’ (is there no limit to My Lady Castlemaine’s self-worth?) and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean Five’ (personally, methinks Master Depp is no match for Betteridge).

Yet further discouraged by this shameful neglect of our national defences, and by ye news of ye debacle at court involving ye ministry of Sir Terence May, his wife Philippa, his mistress Arlene, and his pug Brexit, I retreated forthwith to a tavern, being minded to accost serving wenches, but found instead only a multiply tattooed serving Romanian called Dumitru.

Even further discouraged, I took to this, the pages of my diary, encrypted to a level that not even North Frieslander hackers –  or, worse, my wife – can decipher.

And so to bed.