J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Royal Navy history

The Real Gentlemen Captains, Redux, Part I

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In the lead-up to my appearance on 13 March at Weymouth Leviathan, Britain’s first maritime literary festival, I thought I’d reblog some of my very earliest posts on this site, from November 2011, about some of the characters who will be making appearances during my talk. Here’s the first of them!

People often ask me to what extent the characters in the Quinton Journals, especially Matthew himself, are based on real people. I thought I’d use my next few blog posts to introduce some of the real-life individuals whose careers in Charles II’s navy provided the inspiration for Matthew and some of his adventures; and yes, occasionally the lives of these officers provide a few clues to some of the story lines in future books of the series! In future blogs I’ll also go on to detail some of the ‘tarpaulin’ officers who provided the inspiration for the character and career of Kit Farrell.

Captain Francis Digby – Probably born in about 1645, he was the second son of George Digby, second Earl of Bristol, one of Charles I’s most important (if catastrophic) advisors during the Civil War. He went to sea just after the Restoration, aged about fifteen, and fought at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665 as a volunteer with Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red Squadron. In March 1666 he became lieutenant of the flagship Royal Charles, and his good service in that role during the Four Days Battle at the beginning of June led to his promotion to captain of the Fourth Rate frigate Jersey. His bravery is indicated by the fact that when the Jersey went in for repair after the St James’s day fight, Digby asked permission to go back to sea on another ship as a volunteer (a request rejected by the admiral, the grumpy old Duke of Albemarle). In 1667 he commanded the frigate Greenwich, which seems to have been given to him by King Charles II principally as a means of trying to restore the Digby family fortune, which had been ruined by the civil war. In 1668-9 he commanded the Third Rate Mountague in the Mediterranean. Digby’s manuscript journal for these commands, preserved at the British Library, reveals that despite his aristocratic background, he gradually became a highly competent seaman; on one occasion only his quick thinking prevented the fleet being wrecked on the North African coast.

Digby spent March and April 1672 in France, ‘fine tuning’ the naval agreement by which a combined Anglo-French fleet would attack the Dutch to fulfil the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover (1670). Digby met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and during the next few days had several meetings with the king’s chief minister, Colbert. Not surprisingly the French rejected out of hand Digby’s suggestion that their captains and ships should have English commissions and colours, on the grounds that ‘his Christian Majesty never could suffer his captains to take commissions but from himself’. Despite this and some other disagreements, Digby’s negotiations were complete by 12 March. After leaving Paris he undertook a tour of inspection to Brest and La Rochelle before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry. Digby was apparently somewhat disappointed by this, believing that he was already qualified to be a flag officer; indeed, if he had lived there is little doubt that he would have been an admiral before the end of the third Anglo-Dutch war, as several men junior to him were promoted to such rank during it. But on 28 May 1672 the Dutch under Michiel De Ruyter launched a surprise pre-emptive attack on the Anglo-French fleet as it lay in Solebay. The Henry was in the admiral’s division of the Blue Squadron, which bore the brunt of the fighting; the flagship Royal James was burned by a fireship and her admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, killed. The Henry had the next highest number of casualties in the squadron, with 49 killed. Francis Digby was one of them. He was buried at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, the mausoleum of the Russell family, Earls and later Dukes of Bedford; his mother was a daughter of the fourth Earl.

Digby was one of the many suitors of Frances Stuart, the model for the original image of ‘Britannia’ and later the Duchess of Richmond. Digby’s pursuit of her, like King Charles’s own, proved to be hopeless. He was said to have been driven to distraction by her ‘cruelty’, and after his death at Solebay Dryden wrote ‘Farewell, Fair Armida’, a poignant epitaph to unrequited love:

Farewell, fair Armida, my joy and my grief!
In vain I have loved you, and hope no relief;
Undone by your virtue, too strict and severe,
Your eyes gave me love, and you gave me despair:
Now called by my honour, I seek with content
The fate which in pity you would not prevent:
To languish in love were to find, by delay,
A death that’s more welcome the speediest way.
On seas and in battles, in bullets and fire,
The danger is less than in hopeless desire;
My death’s wound you give me, though far off I bear
My fall from your sight—not to cost you a tear:
But if the kind flood on a wave should convey,
And under your window my body should lay,
The wound on my breast when you happen to see,
You’ll say with a sigh—it was given by me.

The Sailors’ (and Soldiers’) Graves

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Last week’s post about naval and maritime graves in west Wales got a very positive response, so I thought I’d return to a similar theme this time. I spent the second half of last week further north, on the shores of Cardigan Bay, dodging torrential downpours, visiting a few places of naval interest (both expected and unexpected) and doing some research in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. As I think I’ve said before in these blogs, the latter must be one of the nicest study environments anywhere in the world – where else can you sit at your desk and look out over a glorious vista of sea, hills and a medieval castle? (My runner up would be the library of the National War Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where you can get a stunning view over Princes Street, the Scott memorial and the Firth of Forth to the hills of Fife – but only from the gents’ loo…) It turned out to be a really productive session, perhaps the best discovery being the autobiography of a Victorian seaman from Aberdare who provides some fascinating information about naval life in the 1870s and 1880s. He’ll be one of the ‘stars’ of Britannia’s Dragon!

Other ports of call included Barmouth, where I arrived during a near-monsoon; diving out of the car, I got a picture of the new memorial to local man Harold Lowe, fifth officer on the Titanic (played, appropriately, in the film by fellow Welshman Ioan Gruffydd!). Lowe was an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War I and was aboard HMS Suffolk in Vladivostok in 1919, during the Russian Civil War. There’s a good account of this, and of his life as a whole, in Inger Sheil’s new biography of Lowe. The other intriguing naval memorial that I came across was in the somewhat unlikely setting of the church of St Peter ad Vincula (‘St Peter in Chains’) in Pennal, near Machynlleth. Pennal is a tiny village now, but it was once a really important place; the church was a chapel royal for the Kings of Gwynedd and then for the Princes of Wales, including Owain Glyndwr. Indeed, Glyndwr held his second parliament here and signed the ‘Pennal letter’, a document asking for recognition and support from the King of France. But on the wall of the church is a memorial to Commander Edmund Wybergh Thruston, Royal Navy, second-in-command of the cruiser HMAS Sydney when she encountered the German raider Kormoran on 20 November 1941. The Sydney won the engagement but was also lost during it, and for decades her fate was a mystery and a source of considerable debate in Australia. The wreck was finally discovered in 2008, but it was both strange and moving to discover such a poignant reminder of one of Australia’s great national tragedies so many thousands of miles from where it took place. (I was able to do some research on the Thruston family at the National Library: Captain Charles Thruston, RN, of Suffolk, who died in 1858, married the heiress of the Talgarth estate near Pennal, and Edmund was their great-grandson.)

Finally, here’s one of the places I visited on my way home: the tiny, ancient church of Pilleth, near ‘Offa’s Dyke’ and the English border. The hill behind it is Bryn Glas, and it was here, on 22 June 1402, that the Welsh army under Owain Glyndwr fought and defeated that of Edmund Mortimer. The mass grave of those who died is still marked in the churchyard. Mortimer defected to Glyndwr’s side and married his daughter, a story taken up by Shakespeare in Henry IV Part I (which coincidentally I studied for A-level and which has just been given a brilliant new treatment by the BBC, first broadcast last weekend). Shakespeare called him ‘Owen Glendower’, and that name was used twice by the Royal Navy – firstly for a frigate built in 1808, which distinguished itself in anti-slavery operations off the African coast, and secondly, without the ‘Owen’, for the training base established at Pwllheli in the second World War (perhaps better known in its later incarnation as a Butlins’ holiday camp!). Both HMS Glendowers feature prominently in Britannia’s Dragon, but the very fact the name was used at all is surely pretty remarkable, and must partly be due to his appearance as a character in Shakespeare. Maybe one of the readers of this blog can provide evidence to the contrary, but I don’t know of any instance of, say, the French or Spanish navies ever naming warships or important shore establishments after the leaders of failed Breton, Corsican, Basque or Catalan independence movements. Even the United States Navy, which has had no difficulty in naming warships Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson (albeit only once in each case, 100 years after their Civil War), has baulked at naming one after Confederate President Jefferson Davis!

The Comfort Zone

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One of the challenges and delights of working on my new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales, is that it’s taking me into all sorts of uncharted territory and, in some cases, territory I’m revisiting after many years. The book is meant to cover the entire time period from the Romans (AD 60, to be exact, and Suetonius’ attack on Anglesey) to the present day, so large areas are well outside what I’d regard as my comfort zone. I suppose that said zone would extend from the sixteenth century through to about 1815, with the core being my principal specialisation from about 1640 to about 1700. But as I’ve said before in this blog and elsewhere, I originally started out with an interest in twentieth-century warships, so the period from roughly 1939 onwards is also an area I’m very comfortable with. Over the years I’ve also done various bits and pieces of work on aspects of the Victorian period and World War I, so getting up to speed there isn’t a problem at all.

All of which still leaves huge swathes of history that are relatively new to me, and very exciting. The American civil war has always fascinated me – I remember collecting picture card series about it when I was a boy, I recently read Amanda Foreman’s vast and very impressive study of Britain’s relationship with the conflict, and, yes, I own the DVDs of both Gettysburg and Gods and Generals – but I had no real idea of just how many Welshmen served, or of the part that Welsh waters played in the fitting out of some of the Confederate raiders. There were Welshmen aboard the Monitor, the Virginia (aka Merrimac) and the Alabama, and from my point of view, the recent reconstruction of the face of one of the Welsh crewmen on the Monitor has been really timely. I’ve also had to find out more about the various wars between the South American states in the 19th century – Welshmen and other Britons served in pretty well all of their navies and all of their wars, and one of the early heroes of the Chilean navy was an ‘Admiral Bynon’, originally a Beynon from the Gower.

But the really big leap outside the comfort zone has come with what could be termed ‘the early stuff’. My knowledge of the Romans is probably pretty similar to that of most people, i.e. nice walks on Hadrian’s Wall and occasional visits to the likes of Caerleon, watching Gladiator and episodes of Time Team, and Monty Python’s rant about ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’. I suppose my opinions were jaundiced by my experience of school Latin, which was taught by a formidable gentleman who possessed a truly Roman nose, was inevitably nicknamed ‘Caesar’, and seemed old enough to have actually known his namesake at first-hand. (A corrective – he later became the Headmaster pro tem, very much in ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ fashion, and I got to both know him very well and to respect him greatly.) Despite Caesar’s best efforts I never became much good at Latin (nor any languages, come to that), although I loved the historical aspects, so getting up to speed on the Saxon shore forts, the Classis Britannica and last year’s exciting archaeological discoveries at Caerleon has been hugely enjoyable.

The same is true of that period which it was still politically correct to term ‘the Dark Ages’ when I first studied it at Oxford. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the period from 410 (when, according to the university’s Modern History Faculty, ‘modern history’ began) to 1066 and beyond – I was taught the Venerable Bede by a bouncy ex-nun and the really Dark Ages by James Campbell, a wonderful, inspiring Oxford don of the old school whose rooms were a battleground for domination between books and cats. It always intrigued me how historians of the period could disagree so violently over a tiny number of sources – at the time the great controversy was over James Morris’s Age of Arthur, which built an enormously complex and ambitious interpretation of the period by making some remarkably imaginative assumptions (some of his critics preferred ‘ludicrous guesses’) based on minute fragments of evidence. In getting myself up to speed on such topics as the ‘Strathclyde Welsh’,  King Edgar’s famous rowing ceremony on the Dee in 973, and whether the Vikings were really the horn-helmeted pillagers of my recollection ((but said recollection might be over-dependent on the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis film, The Vikings…) or else the nice peaceful cuddly-bunny traders that modern orthodoxy seems to favour, I see that little seems to have changed – historians still seem to be arguing over exactly the same phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, etc, that were causing them so much angst over thirty years ago! And then again, something strange seems to have happened to Norse names; the king I’ve always called Harold Hardrada now seems to be known as Haraldr harðráði, so do I have to adopt the latter? Of course, the added complication with Welsh history is the astonishing proliferation of petty kingdoms and kings with pretty similar names. So remind me again – which was which out of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Gruffydd ap Cynan and Gruffydd ap Rhydderch, not to mention Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, when did Deheubarth replace Dyfed, and can I attribute any naval history of any sort to the kingdom of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren? But seriously, getting outside the comfort zone is good. It’s refreshing. It’s exhilarating. Historians and authors everywhere should try it!

Below: the estuary of the River Tywi, site of the naval battle of Abertywi in 1044 between the Dublin-Norse fleet recruited by Hywel ap Edwin, King of Deheubarth, and the native fleet of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd, the only native Welsh ruler in the era of independent kingdoms to establish his own powerful naval force; Gruffydd won a decisive victory and Hywel was killed. On the right-hand headland stands Llansteffan Castle, built in the 12th century to guard both the navigable river leading to Carmarthen, then the largest town in Wales and the seat of royal government in the south, and the important ferry across the Tywi estuary (part of the major pilgrimage route to St David’s cathedral). Behind the left-hand, or southern, headland is the estuary of the Taf, leading to Laugharne of Dylan Thomas fame.  

Navy and Nation

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Last week I attended the ‘Navy is the Nation’ conference at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth naval base. Despite being held against a backdrop of intermittent storms sweeping in from the Solent, this proved to be a very enjoyable affair, superbly organised by Simon Williams and Matt Chorley. I was one of the speakers, using my talk to try out some of the ideas that’ll be appearing in my next non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. This seemed to go down very well – I always attempt to leaven my talks with plenty of humour, and I got a gratifying number of laughs. (‘Whenever I tell people I’m writing a naval history of Wales, I tend to get one of two reactions. One is “there wasn’t any”; the other is that people tell coracle jokes. Stealth coracles. Nuclear powered coracles. That sort of thing.’ There was also a good response to my suggestion that Wales provided arguably the most reviled name in British naval history – not Bligh, not John Byng, but Sub-Lieutenant Christopher Leyland, the man who gave the world that scourge of suburban gardens and source of endless arguments between neighbours, the dreaded Leylandii.)

Of the other speakers, most of the attention inevitably focused on the opening keynote address by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, particularly his throwaway line that decommissioning HMS Ark Royal and doing without aircraft carriers for a decade was ‘taking a punt’ – which, as he half-admitted, had been made to look rather silly by the events in Libya and the re-emergence of what he called ‘the obvious exception’ to the strategic assumption of being able to rely on other nations’ carriers, i.e. tension over the Falkland Islands. However, as one would expect there were also weighty contributions from some very eminent naval historians. The ever-entertaining and provocative Professor Eric Grove weighed in against the media’s lazy conflation of the terms ‘army’ and ‘armed forces’, now effectively seen as synonymous, and emphasised how the navy had a serious PR problem caused by its association with seemingly old-fashioned ways of warfare and with the controversial legacies of the British Empire, not to mention the fact that it had lacked a serious friend in Cabinet since A V Alexander in Attlee’s ministry. Eric rightly pointed out that despite their rhetoric in opposition, Conservative governments have always been far less friendly to the navy than Labour ones – contrast the large number of warship orders placed by the Wilson/Callaghan administration of 1974-9 with the Nott defence review of 1981, let alone the rather more recent precedents. (Wearing my hat as chairman of the Naval Dockyards Society, I might add that all closures of major dockyards and naval bases in the 20th century took place under Conservative governments.) Eric was in a ‘double header’ session with Professor Geoffrey Till, who made an impassioned plea for the UK to invest in its navy or sink into irrelevance; as he emphasised, the future is going to be maritime because of the shift of global power to the east (this decade will be the first time in 400 years that the Far East will spend more on naval defence than Europe). Instead, the last decades and the priorities of the present government could be summed up in Till’s brilliant phrase, ‘Engage the enemy more cheaply’.

Other talks had less immediate political relevance but were nevertheless of great interest to naval historians. It was good to see and talk to Professor John Hattendorf again, having not seen him for some twenty years or so; he delivered a fascinating survey of the complex relationship between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy. There was also an interesting talk about aspects of Tudor seapower from Andrew Lambert, the Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College London, whose professorial lecture on the war of 1812 I’d attended a couple of days earlier, in the process getting hold of a signed copy of his new book The Challenge (a title which could refer equally to the US Navy’s challenge to the mighty British fleet in 1812 and to Andrew’s own challenge to the orthodoxy about the naval war that holds sway on the other side of the pond). Andrew also provided a nice ‘trailer’ for one of my themes in Britannia’s Dragon by focusing heavily on John Dee, the Welsh mystic who largely conceived of the concept of the ‘British empire’ in Elizabeth I’s reign; equally useful for me were James Davey‘s material on the importance of popular perceptions of the Matthews-Lestock case in 1744 (Matthews was from Llandaff) and Duncan Redford‘s analysis of geographical warship naming from the late 19th century through to the 1970s, which showed that Welsh names were surprisingly well represented, especially in comparison with Scottish ones.

So all in all, it was a very enjoyable and productive conference, one which was coloured by frequent barbs against a whole range of ‘panto villains’ ranging from our esteemed Prime Minister to President Sarkozy via Sir Winston Churchill (virulently anti-navy in later life, which I hadn’t realised) and of course the RAF. The real highlight, though, was the conference dinner in the wardroom of HMS Nelson. I’d eaten there before, some twenty years ago when serving as a Sub-Lieutenant RNR (CCF), but had forgotten quite how splendid a room it is, adorned with great murals of Trafalgar, the Glorious First of June and so forth, along with the coats-of-arms of British naval heroes from Drake to Nelson. It’s a shame the public hardly ever gets to see it; but if governments continue to cut back the navy and eventually sell the now unfeasibly large wardroom building, perhaps one day it might!

1665: The Second Blast

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In the summer of 1665, while plague was beginning to spread in London, one of the greatest battles of the sailing era took place. The Battle of Lowestoft ‘was one of the most blue-blooded battles of the age of sail. The British fleet was commanded in person by James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral, heir to the throne, and the first prince to command a fleet in battle since the days of the Plantaganets’ (as I put it in Pepys’s Navy). Prince Rupert of the Rhine commanded the White Squadron of the British fleet, while a horde of aristocrats swarmed to sea as volunteers: they included Charles II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, the king’s favourite the Earl of Falmouth, and a number of the most famous Restoration rakes, such as the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Buckhurst. Meanwhile the Dutch were hamstrung by factional jealousies between their seven provinces and five admiralties. As a result their fleet had no fewer than twenty-one flag officers, the British only nine (in the pattern established in 1653 of admirals, vice-admirals and rear-admirals of the Red, White and Blue squadrons). The bitter rivalries in the Dutch fleet ultimately caused chaos during the battle itself, contributing to one of the worst defeats of the Netherlands’ ‘golden age’.

On paper, though, the two fleets were relatively equal. The Dutch had 107 ships, 92 of which carried thirty guns or more, and the fleet as a whole mounted 4,864 guns and was manned by 21,500 men. The British had 88 ships mounting thirty guns or more in a fleet carrying a total of about 4,800 guns and some 24,000 men. But these bare figures concealed a huge disparity in weight of shot: the British had twenty-seven ships capable of firing over 1,000 pounds of shot, the Dutch just one. (Pepys’s Navy)

What follows is a precis of my account of the battle in Pepys’s Navy:

The two fleets sighted each other on 1 June, but on that and the next day, Obdam (the general appointed to command the Dutch fleet) refused to attack, despite the apparent advantage that the easterly wind gave him…By the morning of the third, though, the wind had come round more to the south-south-west, favouring the British, and at 2 a.m. the fleets were about five miles apart. From dawn (about 4 a.m.) onwards, both sides manoeuvred to gain the weather gage, a contest that was won by Vice-Admiral Christopher Myngs, flying his flag in the Triumph, and the van division of the Red. The two fleets then passed each other on opposite tacks, too far apart to do any real damage to each other…Once the two lines had passed each other, at about 5.30, the Dutch began to tack, and York intended his fleet to tack from the rear, according to his new fighting instruction; but it took so long for his flagship to hoist the correct signal that Rupert, commanding the van or White squadron, used his initiative and tacked first. This seemingly confused Sir John Lawson, leading the van of the Red in the Royal Oak, who did not tack in his turn, thereby opening up a gap between the White, now heading north-west, and the Red, still heading south-east. To remedy the situation, Penn took the flagship Royal Charles out of the line, followed by the Earl of Sandwich’s Blue squadron. The manoeuvre was made smartly enough to prevent the Dutch breaking through the fleet as it tacked, although Sandwich almost became entangled in a mass of confused ships. The two squadrons then formed a second line to windward, the Red covering Rupert and the White while the Blue fell in behind the latter. Obdam attempted to break through to gain the weather gage at about 7.00, but was deterred by the presence of the Red, and as the two lines came abreast on opposite tacks, at about 8.00, James again ordered his fleet to tack from the rear, this time with better success. Carrying out this remarkably difficult manoeuvre while under fire was an astonishing achievement, never to be repeated in the rest of the age of sail…

At about 10 a.m., both sides began a terrific bombardment that lasted for some eight hours, and could be heard plainly in London…Lawson, leading the van again, was wounded (mortally, as it later transpired); his ship dropped out of the line, and his division fell into confusion…The centre and rear divisions of the Red remained to windward, effectively out of the action, leading the commander of the latter (Berkeley of the Swiftsure) to be publicly derided for cowardice; the commander of the former, the Duke of York, also came in for criticism after the battle, though it is possible that Sir William Penn, making the decisions on the flagship, sought to keep the Red apart as a reserve, ready to support any part of the line that required it. Sandwich’s vast but cumbersome Royal Prince and her seconds came under such heavy attack from Obdam’s 84-gun flagship Eendracht and the 76-gun East Indiaman Oranje that James and the Red finally committed to the action and sailed down to relieve them. Sandwich and Rupert both then launched their squadrons into the heart of the Dutch fleet, Sandwich noting that he hoisted ‘my blue flag on the mizzen peak, a sign for my squadron to follow me’.  York’s Royal Charles then fell in alongside the Eendracht, and the two flagships began a murderous duel. At about noon, three courtiers standing next to James on the quarterdeck were killed by one chainshot, and the heir to the throne was splattered with their brains. Obdam, too, was killed, and a little later, at about 2.30 the magazine of the Eendracht exploded, killing all but five of the 409 men on board. The blast, which was probably caused by an error in handling powder, shook houses and blew open windows in The Hague.

The destruction of the Eendracht fully exposed the weaknesses in the Dutch command structure, and the inter-provincial jealousies that blighted their fleet. Kortenaer, Obdam’s nominal deputy, was severely wounded and unable to assume command, but his flag captain kept his pendant flying. Meanwhile, the Amsterdam contingent, led by Cornelis Tromp (son of the great Maarten, killed at Scheveningen), would not accept orders from the next in seniority, Jan Evertsen, a Zeelander, so the afternoon ended in chaos, with three separate ships flying the commander-in-chief’s pendant of distinction. Many ships simply turned and fled. The Dutch were pursued relentlessly by the British squadrons, although the Red was held up for some time by the astonishing attack of the lone East Indiaman Oranje, which took on the Royal Charles herself before gradually succumbing to the steady stream of the duke’s seconds as they came up in turn. Small groups of Dutch ships were cut off and forced to surrender, or were destroyed by fireships…

In all, and including several captures of fleeing ships made on the following morning, the Dutch had lost seventeen ships. Eight had been destroyed, including the three largest, and nine captured. There were about five thousand casualties, twenty per cent of the fleet’s manpower, which included the commander-in-chief and two other flag officers killed. 2,844 prisoners of war were landed in Suffolk in the immediate aftermath of the battle. By contrast, the British had lost one ship and only some 700 men, though these included two flag officers, including Lawson (whose wound turned gangrenous), and the royal favourite Falmouth, one of the three young men scythed down alongside the Duke of York.

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However, the British failed to exploit their victory. Sail was mysteriously shortened during the night, allowing the Dutch fleet to escape; this was attributed to the actions of a courtier, Henry Brouncker, allegedly acting under orders from the Duke of York. The mystery of Brouncker’s motivation forms part of the plot of the third ‘journal of Matthew Quinton’, The Blast That Tears The Skies, and all the other key events of the battle feature in the story too.

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Finally, and changing subject entirely, today is the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the Falklands War. I originally started out as a ‘warship buff’, my primary interest being in the Royal Navy’s ships of my childhood and youth, so the war, the first time the navy of that era saw action, was something that made a huge impact on me. I also have some hopefully unique recollections of and perspectives on it that I’ll share on this site in future posts. In the meantime, a Happy Easter to all!

The Princes, the Removal Men and the Big Hole in the Ground

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It’s been a busy week! On Saturday I chaired the Naval Dockyards Society AGM at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, before joining a party of society members on a walking tour of the site of the old Deptford royal dockyard. This is currently the location of a huge and ongoing archaeological dig preparatory to redevelopment of the site, although the development itself is proving controversial and is about to be redesigned yet again. The tour was certainly a real eye-opener. Although the vast foundations of the Tudor ‘great storehouse’ (left) have now been covered over, work has moved on to other parts of the site, exposing, for example, the dockyard smithy, No. 1 slipway and, most interesting of all from the viewpoint of a Stuart navy buff like myself, the walls of the wet dock, including a fragment of timber from the 16th century wall (below right). This struck a particular chord with me as the wet dock is the setting for an important scene in ‘Quinton 2’, The Mountain of Gold, which seems to be going down really well in the US following its publication there a few weeks ago. To think that this would have been part of the dockyard that Samuel Pepys knew, and where, in my fiction, Matthew Quinton fought the flames threatening the Seraph! It was also reassuring to find that my description of the dimensions of the dockyard, e.g. how long it would have taken people to move from one side of it to the other, which I derived from plans and pictures of the yard, was borne out pretty much completely by the actual experience of walking the site. More photos of Deptford dockyard will be posted on the NDS Facebook page in the next few days.

I was also in Greenwich a couple of days earlier to welcome back to England the sternpiece of the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch at Chatham in 1667, which is returning to form part of the forthcoming Royal River exhibition at the NMM (I’ve been invited to the royal opening of this by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, so hopefully will be able to provide a ‘sneak preview’ in a future post). I’ve covered the sternpiece, and provided a picture of it, in an earlier post, so I won’t dwell on the importance of this iconic item here. But the return itself wasn’t quite what I’d expected. We were due to go aboard HNlMS Holland, the newest ship in the Dutch Navy, at moorings off Greenwich, but arrived to find said moorings disconcertingly empty. It transpired that thick fog had prevented her coming up the Thames on time, so the whole event had been moved to the Queen’s House. At this point I still expected the event in question to consist of a few dozen museum and embassy people milling around. Instead, the lawn behind Queen’s House was filled with hundreds of people, large numbers of military and naval folk in dress uniform, a naval guard of honour, along with TV and press galore. We had an announcement that ‘the princes are coming’, and a few minutes later, they duly appeared – Prince Michael of Kent and the Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne, both in flag officer uniforms. The band played, the dignitaries saluted and up rolled…a typical British furniture van, from which emerged typical British removal men, who proceeded to unload a very large box adorned with a picture of the sternpiece; and as is the way of British removal men, they did so with much grunting, scratching of heads and seemingly coming very close to dropping the whole thing off the back of the van. Nevertheless, the box duly emerged, the speeches were made (I’ll draw a veil over the number of basic historical howlers in one of them in particular) and the audience turned to the champagne, canapes and networking, which in my case involved talking about the volume of views of battles of the third Anglo-Dutch war that I’m editing for the Navy Records Society.

From a purely personal viewpoint, the return of the Royal Charles sternpiece is remarkably timely. She was the fleet flagship in the 1665 campaign and above all in the Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June, which forms the climax of ‘Quinton 3’, The Blast That Tears The Skies. Indeed, her duel with the Dutch flagship Eendracht leads to the dramatic event that gives the book its title. (Incidentally, several people have asked me about the origin of the title; it’s from the third verse of Rule, Britannia.) Several important scenes are set aboard the Royal Charles and quite a number of them are based on real events, such as a council of war that was attended by some of the most famous names of Restoration England and the Restoration Navy: King Charles II’s brother James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral and the future King James II & VII; Charles’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth; Prince Rupert of the Rhine; the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most famous Restoration rakes; Sir William Penn, father of the founder of Pennsylvania; and of course, in my version by Matthew Quinton too. They would have been sitting literally a few feet from the wonderful relic of the Restoration navy that will be on display at Greenwich this summer and which I strongly urge all of you in the UK to go and see – clutching copies of Blast of course!