J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Michiel De Ruyter

The Top Ten

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I’m not tweeting very much at the moment, as I’m largely keeping my head down and working on my new Tudor project, but the other day, I had a bit of a brainwave, and tweeted a ‘top ten’ of the most popular posts ever (in terms of visitor numbers) on this blog. This seemed to go down very well among the Twitterati, with lots of positive reaction. I realise, though, that a lot of you aren’t on Twitter, and besides, giving the ‘countdown’ here means that I can say a bit more about each of the posts than I could with 140 characters. So, in the spirit of Top of the Pops (unless it was presented by him, obviously, or featured songs by him…), here we go, pop pickers!

I decided to split my top ten into two fives, one for guest bloggers, one for my own posts. So starting with the guest blogger chart –

So moving on to the chart of my own posts:

  • At number 5, and with a major ‘assist’ from Richard Endsor, it’s a pretty astonishing historical find – quite possibly the fingerprint of Samuel Pepys!
  • In at number 4, a post from back in 2012, looking forward to the temporary return of the Royal Charles sternpiece from the Rijksmuseum for the National Maritime Museum’s Royal River exhibition.
  • Number 3 is probably my personal favourite among all the blog posts I’ve written over the years – my lament for the death of the ‘naval pub‘, broadly defined. Since I originally posted it, another nail’s been hammered into the coffin of the species with the closure of the Lord Nelson at Burnham Thorpe. Hopefully this will be temporary, but could there be a more potent metaphor for the decline of…well, pretty much everything, really?
  • At number 2, the first post in my long series about the sorry saga of Carmarthenshire Archives – if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, read the three subsequent posts entitled ‘J’Accuse’ too, but for the rather more optimistic current situation, have a look here.
  • And at number 1…cue drumroll…my post from four years ago, ‘A Journalist’s Guide to Writing About the Royal Navy‘, inspired by the consistently dreadful coverage of naval matters in the national media, and which went about as viral as niche naval blogs get. As some of the below-the-line comments proved, though, one should always be careful before sticking one’s head above the parapet in such instances, and I was rightly taken to task for some of my own inexactitudes of terminology!

As I said on Twitter at the weekend, a big thank you to everybody who’s followed this blog since it started back in August 2011. It’s good to know that so many people seem to find things to interest them among my rants and ramblings, so I hope to keep calm and carry on shedding light on some of the more remote corners of naval history and seventeenth century history, and on the process of writing about them, for the foreseeable future!

Amsterdam Good Time, Part 2

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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!!

Dead Admirals Society on Tour: Sicily

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By the time this post goes live, we’ll be sunning ourselves by a poolside in Sicily. It’s complete coincidence, of course, but this ties in very nicely with last week’s guest blog from Gijs Rommelse, about the film Michiel De Ruyter: the great Dutch admiral perished in 1676 in battle off Augusta, on the east coast of the island, when his Dutch fleet was attempting to expel the French from Messina in order to restore the city to the Spanish, the Netherlands’ allies. (As preparation for the holiday, I’ve recently been reading John Julius Norwich‘s new history of Sicily, which says this about this episode: ‘the Sicilians were shocked by the drunkenness and debauchery of the Dutch, while the Dutch were contemptuous of the apparent fecklessness of their hosts’.) Further south on the same coast is Cape Passaro, where in 1718 Admiral George Byng won a stunning victory over the Spanish fleet – a victory that has never quite been accorded the place in the pantheon of British naval triumphs that it undoubtedly deserves, probably because Britain wasn’t actually at war with Spain at the time. Nevertheless, Byng became a national hero and was ennobled as the first Viscount Torrington, retiring to his estate at Southill in Bedfordshire, which is only several stones’ throws from where I’m typing these words. And there, in 1733, he was buried, to be followed into the family vault twenty-four years later by his younger son John, famously – or infamously – the only British admiral ever to be executed; as Voltaire said, pour encourager les autres. Of course, Nelson spent time in Sicily when his affair with Lady Hamilton was arguably at its most embarrassing stage, and was made Duke of Bronte by a grateful King Ferdinand. I doubt if we’ll have time to visit ‘Nelson’s Castle‘, but then, neither did he!

There’ll be no post next week due to the holiday, but on the following Monday I hope to be back with some impressions of Sicily and its history. Having said that, we’re staying quite close to the town of Corleone, which is possibly ominous…so if there’s no post after all, you’ll know that I’m sleeping with the fishes.

In the meantime, then, here’s the tomb of George Byng, the victor of Cape Passaro.

The Film and the Facts: About the Movie Michiel de Ruyter

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I’m delighted to welcome a distinguished guest blogger this week, to bring relief from the recent overdose of politics! Gijs Rommelse is one of the pre-eminent Dutch maritime and political historians of the early modern period, being the author of The Second Anglo-Dutch War: International Raison d’état, Mercantilism and Maritime Strife, the co-author with Roger Downing of A Fearful Gentleman: Sir George Downing in The Hague, 1658-72, and co-editor with David Onnekink of Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe, 1650-1750. He is also the editor of Holland Historisch Tijdschrift, in which the Dutch version of the following review first appeared.

The Battle of Kijkduin / the Texel, 1673, by Willem Van de Velde the elder. Union flags as jacks, ensigns at the stern, as they should be...
The Battle of Kijkduin / the Texel, 1673, by Willem Van de Velde the elder. Union flags as jacks, ensigns at the stern, as they should be…

I’ve mentioned the lavish new Dutch film about the great 17th century admiral Michiel de Ruyter in an earlier blog on this site. Although it seems to have reached the USA and even China, there’s still no sign of its English subtitled version, titled Admiral, in British cinemas (or DVD shops) – but then, we’re most definitely the bad guys in this, so perhaps the distribution company reckons there won’t be too much of an audience. Consequently, all I’ve seen of the film are some stills and its rather impressive trailer, embedded below at the end of Gijs’s review. However, even this limited view enables me to add a couple more jarring notes from a British perspective. Quite why the film-makers decided to show British warships flying the Union flag as an ensign is beyond me, especially as they seem to be flying ensigns as jacks…and as for casting 68 year old Charles Dance as King Charles II, who would have been at most 43 years old in the period covered by the film, presumably this was some sort of ploy to pack in Dance’s fans from Game of Thrones, as I suggested in this blog a few months back. But I’ll reserve further judgement until I see the film in its entirety, and will hand over in the meantime to Gijs – with big thank you’s to him both for his permission to reproduce this translation of his review on this site, and for his generous mention of my essay on British perceptions of de Ruyter!

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A lieutenant-admiral in a naval battle, sabre in hand, swinging over on a rope to an English ship to personally kill a dozen enemies? Prince William III of Orange forcing De Ruyter, through blackmail and threats against his family, to sail to the Mediterranean to commit suicide in a battle against a larger French fleet, because the Prince, prompted by the Rotterdam schemer Johan Kievit, had come to regard the legendary naval commander as the heir of Johan de Witt’s republican heritage? The highly experienced French commander Abraham Duquesne fooled in a childishly simple way by De Ruyter, and sailing his entire squadron onto a sandbank at Kijkduin? Cornelis Tromp gradually developing from a jealous, undisciplined prima donna to a hidden admirer of De Ruyter? These are just some examples of the historical inaccuracies and fabrications which the screenwriters of the new film spectacle Michiel de Ruyter employ to dramatize the heroism and tragedy in the life of the famous naval hero for the general public.

In about two and a half hours, the film tells the story of the career of the great admiral from Flushing during the three Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-1654, 1665-1667 and 1672-1674), and his eventual death at the hands of a French fleet in 1676. By placing De Ruyter on board Admiral Maarten Harpertsz Tromp’s flag ship Brederode moments before his demise during the Battle of Scheveningen (1653) and letting Tromp’s dying words be directed to him, the makers suggest that De Ruyter was sent by Tromp on a kind of sacred mission to be his successor and lead the Dutch fleet in battle. In reality, this would happen only in 1665, after De Ruyter’s predecessor Wassenaar van Obdam’s ship Eendracht had exploded during the Battle of Lowestoft.

The Battle of Lowestoft, 1665, by Van de Velde the elder (National Maritime Museum)
The Battle of Lowestoft, 1665, by Van de Velde the elder (National Maritime Museum)

It is true that Johan de Witt, who in 1653 took office as pensionary of the province of Holland, recognized in De Ruyter a formidable talent, someone who would be particularly suitable as a fleet commander. The film rightly makes clear that De Witt played a crucial role in the professionalization of the fleet organization and the building of a strong standing navy. A series of defeats during the First Anglo-Dutch War had shown that the old model – a limited number of purpose-built warships supplemented for the occasion by a much larger number of converted merchant ships – was completely outdated. The great statesman managed to create political support for the ambitious naval construction programme through his extensive network and also organized the financial resources required for this. Incidentally, the film also rightly raises the point that the construction of the standing navy was very much at the expense of the land army, and thus facilitated the invasion by the armies of Louis XIV in 1672. As the film reveals, in fact it was De Ruyter who repeatedly repelled the principal threat posed by the British and French, and thus played a crucial role in the survival of the Republic as an independent state.

Looking at the film, one would get the impression that the career of De Ruyter lasted only a few months, or at most two or three years. The admiral himself, played by Frank Lammers, and his wife and children, never appear a day older. This is because the political and military ramifications of the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars are essentially telescoped into one conflict. It is also striking that one of De Ruyter’s most famous feats is entirely missing from the film: namely, the reconquest of the slave stations of the West India Company (WIC) on the West African coast in 1664-1665. It was this voyage that led activists noisily to disrupt the gala premiere of the film on 26 January 2015 at the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam (see their Facebook page). According to their banners, De Ruyter was a ruthless advocate of slavery. Far-fetched and slightly unhistorical as this accusation might be, the noise of this protest did provide a nice counterbalance to the uncritical worship which De Ruyter invariably receives, and still enjoys in Dutch naval circles. The Royal Netherlands Navy was one of the partners of the production Farmhouse Film & TV.

De Ruyter's funeral procession, Amsterdam, 1677
De Ruyter’s funeral procession, Amsterdam, 1677

Particularly interesting in the film is the role of De Ruyter in the political struggle between the republicans, headed by the brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt, and Orangists seeking the elevation of Prince William III. In the film, De Ruyter is shown as a good friend of the republican brothers; moreover, his naval successes formed an essential pillar for their regime. By contrast, in the most authoritative Dutch literature, most notably the biography by Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, De Ruyter is presented as someone standing more or less outside the political fray, a man who had respect for De Witt and worked together with him, but who otherwise was really only interested in the fortunes of the dear fatherland. This picture seems to have carried over from 19th century studies, which were particularly interested in the glorious deeds of illustrious heroes, and a De Ruyter who was an opponent of Orangism would not fit this image. Interestingly, David Davies recently argued, in an English-language collection of essays on De Ruyter’s life, that far too little attention has been focused on his political role. The film is actually making this same point, although the film-makers were probably just trying to create a villainous opponent to make the story interesting for the viewer, rather than offering a serious reinterpretation. Anyway, maybe it is time that the history of the Dutch fleet in the 17th century should be seen explicitly through a prism of political ideology and polarization.

Finally, it should be noted that the viewer is treated to spectacular battle scenes with sizeable fleets, attractive locations, and a lavish view of the social, economic and religious life of the Dutch Golden Age.

 

#2ADW350

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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!

Lights, Camera, Fireship Attack

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There’s going to be a film about 17th century naval history.

Don’t get too excited: it’s not Gentleman Captain: the Movie, more’s the pity. Instead, the Dutch are making a film about their great national hero, Michiel De Ruyter, apparently set during the years 1672-3. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks very promising indeed. Frank Lammers, the actor portraying De Ruyter, really looks the part, and much of the filming is being done in Veere, which was both a genuine 17th century naval port and is the home town of Matthew’s wife Cornelia in the ‘Quinton Journals’. It’s probably a racing certainty that we Brits will be depicted as the bad guys, but that’s ok – after all, we seem to be the bad guys in pretty well every Hollywood film made these days, too. But it’ll be fascinating to see how the film handles both the complex politics of the time and the complexities of portraying naval warfare convincingly on screen.

Finding out about the De Ruyter movie got me thinking, though: just how often has the 17th century navy been portrayed on screen, even tangentially? Sadly, but probably inevitably, the answer is very little, even if one extends the definition of ’17th century’ down to, say, the end of the Stuart era in 1714 – and before we go any further, let’s be clear that in this context, I’m banning all discussion of the ‘P’ word  (don’t even think of mentioning ‘P of the Caribbean’), even if it means ruling out such wonderful films as those terrific 1930s/40s romps, The Black Swan and Captain Blood, along with the new TV series Black Sails, which hasn’t reached this side of the pond as yet.

It’s easy to see why this should be. I’m currently reading James Chapman’s book, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film, and he makes the following point:

The favourite periods for producers of historical films…have tended to be those which give rise to narratives of national greatness: the Tudor period, which saw the emergence of England as a great power; the Victorian period, which saw industrial progress and imperial expansion; and the Second World War, which in the popular imagination remains ‘our finest hour’.

The corollary of this is that there have been relatively few films or TV series set in the much more ambiguous and fractured 17th century, and even fewer that touch on naval matters. Of course, the reign of Charles II continues to pop up on screen from time to time, but for obvious reasons, the focus of film-makers has always been overwhelmingly on the racy goings-on at court: witness the likes of the Robert Downey Junior film of Rose Tremain’s Restoration, Johnny Depp’s portrayal of the Earl of Rochester in The Libertine, and in earlier years, Forever Amber and Nell Gwynn, of which more anon. But on Chapman’s criteria, it’s very difficult to imagine a film-maker successfully pitching a storyline about, say, the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667, arguably the greatest military humiliation in British history; and even if such a script ever got written, the cost of such a project would probably be prohibitive (which is why there was only ever one Master and Commander film, and relatively few Hornblower TV movies).

There have been a few exceptions. The TV film of Dava Sobel’s book Longitude begins with the destruction of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet on Scilly in 1707. Naval events get a mention every now and again in the very stagey 1970s TV series, The First Churchills, which is available in its entirety on Youtube; see, for example, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ episode, at exactly 34 minutes in (blink and you’ll miss it, though). But far and away the most frequent 17th century naval ‘presence’ on screen has, inevitably, been that of Samuel Pepys. Equally inevitably, Pepys’s role as an important naval administrator hardly ever gets a look-in; his screen appearances have invariably been as a voyeur on the fringes of court naughtiness, scribbling down notes of all the risque goings-on and, perhaps, taking part in them himself. As such, Pepys has cropped up from time to time in films from the 1934 Anna Neagle vehicle Nell Gwynn (which also has as one of its characters a naval seaman who lost an eye fighting the Dutch) to 2004’s Stage Beauty, where he was portrayed by none other than Hugh Bonneville, subsequently Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey. Over the years, too, he has been portrayed by actors as diverse as Edmund Gwenn, better known as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, and even Steve Coogan (‘Aha!’).

There do seem to have been a few attempts to place Pepys in his professional context, but these are either lost or never saw the light of day in the first place. Chapman records that in 1935, there was serious discussion about making an entire film about him, starring George Arliss, but this project was abandoned in favour of Arliss’s somewhat odd portrayal of the Duke of Wellington in The Iron Duke. In 1954, the BBC’s Sunday Night Theatre broadcast a play called ‘Ninety Sail‘, which seems to have been set at the time of the Popish Plot and features, in additions to Pepys, such characters as Charles II, the Duke of York and, less expectedly, Captain Henry Priestman, a relatively obscure but somewhat controversial sea-captain (who, nevertheless, eventually ended up with an impressive memorial in the nave of Westminster Abbey). The script was written by W P Lipscomb, who wrote the screenplays for the likes of Dunkirk, A Town Called Alice and the Ronald Colman version of A Tale of Two Cities, and who won an Oscar, no less, for co-writing the script of Pygmalion with an obscure and long-forgotten hack named, umm, George Bernard Shaw. So ‘Ninety Sail’ might have been well worth seeing – but alas, the BBC either did not record programmes at all during that period, or else subsequently wiped the tapes, so the chances of it re-surfacing are probably nil.

Anyway, I know one thing for certain: I fully intend to go and see the film of Michiel De Ruyter, at a cinema somewhere in the Netherlands, as soon as possible after it opens. OK, I probably won’t understand a word, but I want to see it on the big screen, and if some cinema, somewhere, could show it with English subtitles, I’d be eternally in your debt. Who knows, I might even dedicate a book to you.