J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Samuel Pepys

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!

Come in Number Thirteen, Your Time Has Come

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Last week saw the official publication of my new non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, from the wonderful people at Seaforth Publishing. By my reckoning, this is my thirteenth complete book, and my fifth non-fiction title, to add to eight novels to date. But even I’m losing track of the total number, mainly because there are distinct grey areas. For example, there’s the Quinton prequel Ensign Royal…but that’s only a novella, and only available in e-format, so does that count? OK, maybe I should count that as half a book, which takes me to thirteen and a half. Then there’s the cult bestseller 20th Century Naval Dockyards: Devonport and Portsmouth Characterisation Report, where I’m credited as a co-author. So if I count that as a quarter, I get up to thirteen and three-quarters, and can thus legitimately claim to be the Adrian Mole of authors!

Of course, I’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the phenomenal Professor Jeremy Black, author of well over one hundred full length, fully referenced historical works (and counting) – so many, indeed, that even he seems to have lost track of his publications since 2015. Sometimes, especially after about the third glass, I’ve speculated that Jeremy must be definitive proof that human cloning is already happening, because surely nothing else can explain his prolific rate of publication.

Seriously, though, I’m delighted to see Kings of the Sea in print. For me, it marks the culmination of 35 years of work on the naval history of the Restoration age: and to both further explain the rationale behind it, and to provide a little ‘teaser trailer’ for it, here’s the first part of my preface, followed by the first part of the introduction.

Warning: these are among the least controversial sections of the book.

***

To the best of my recollection, I first conceived the idea of writing a book rather like this one over thirty years ago, when I was locked in Samuel Pepys’s library.

The Pepys Library. Behind the shuttered windows on the first floor sits a historian, longing to munch on a cheese sandwich and starting to worry about the faint smell of burning.

This was not quite the dire emergency, nor the unexpected proof of the feasibility of time travel, that it might sound. Pepys’s glorious bequest to his old Cambridge college, Magdalene, stands four square alongside the River Cam, and contains many of the great man’s papers, contained within exactly 3,000 of his books, no more, no less – arranged, uniquely, in order of size, from the smallest to the largest. When I was working there extensively in the 1980s, the library opened to the public for an hour in the morning, from 11.30 to 12.30, and another in the afternoon, from 2.30 to 3.30; but by prior arrangement, researchers could continue to work through the two hours in between, when the doors of the library were firmly bolted. This necessitated either a very early lunch or a very late one, not to mention unwavering faith in the fire prevention facilities of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and it is hardly surprising that this delightful laissez faire policy eventually fell foul of the relentless advance of ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. But the two hour lock-in, alone with Samuel Pepys’s books, many of them full of the letters written by him to, or send it to him from, the likes of King Charles II and King James II, gave ample time for one’s thoughts to wander in all kinds of directions. One of them involved contemplation of a paradox. In many periods of history, and in many topics of historical study, the role of monarchs has probably been studied more exhaustively than their actual importance often merits, contributing to an overwhelmingly ‘top down’ view of history (and, yes, an often overwhelmingly male one too, for that is what monarchs usually were). The naval history of late seventeenth century Britain is a marked exception. There, if anything, the monarchs have been placed in the background, and in some books, their contributions appear nearly invisible, overshadowed by an even more dominant figure. That person is regarded almost universally as the driving force behind all that happened in the navy of his day, the individual responsible for all that was good and important, the unimpeachable authority for all that took place in naval affairs. I got to know this person very well: after all, I was often locked in his library.

The feeling that Samuel Pepys was, perhaps, not quite as responsible for all that happened in the navy of the Restoration era as posterity believes (essentially because Pepys told posterity what to believe, and posterity duly complied), and that the contributions to naval history of the Stuart brothers, Charles and James, have been somewhat neglected, stayed with me in the years that followed. Indeed, several of the themes and ideas explored in this book first saw the light of day in a number of essays and articles, most of them published in obscure academic journals and collections of essays: which is a polite way of saying ‘nobody read them’. But during the years that followed, other priorities always intervened to take me away from this book.

Now, though, it’s time to set the record straight…

***

And from the introduction (with the references deleted) –

At some point during the afternoon of 30 June 1675, the King of England disappeared.

In many European states of the period, this would have triggered immediate panic. Kings were still regarded by many as little gods upon Earth; the entire political and social order was based, to some extent, on knowing where they were. Both before and since the seventeenth century, there have been countless instances where the sudden disappearance of a head of state has triggered anything from bouts of religious hysteria, to rioting in the streets, to full scale revolutions. But for at least some of those who knew about it, King Charles II’s disappearance on 30 June probably caused little more than a mild frisson of concern, perhaps no more than a few disapproving shakes of the head.

Because the king had gone sailing.

Yet again.

***

Charles II in his sailing outfit

The royal cruise of 1675 involved seven royal yachts and three small frigates. This flotilla set off from Gravesend on 26 June, with the king aboard the Sixth Rate man-of-war Greyhound. A further eight warships, including the Third Rate Harwich and two fireships, joined them in the Downs. Bad weather delayed progress, causing the ‘disappearance’ of the flotilla not once, but several times; the Katherine Yacht lost touch entirely, and was believed to have been lost, while the yacht carrying the Speaker of the House of Commons had to turn back from the Downs. Progress was so slow that the royal party missed the principal object of the voyage, namely attending the launch of the great new First Rate man-of-war Royal James at Portsmouth Dockyard on 29 June. As it was, the other ships in the royal flotilla lost sight of the Greyhound during the ‘very stormy and dark weather’ on the night of 29-30 June, when they were on the west side of the Isle of Wight – a coast notorious for shipwrecks. The vessels sighted each other again in the morning, and the yachts carrying the king’s brother and heir, the Duke of York, and Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, went into Portsmouth. But once again, there was no sign of the Greyhound, which the others expected to make for the Isle of Wight. By early evening, none of the fires which would have signalled a sighting of the ship flying the royal standard could be seen anywhere on the island. At eight the next morning, both James and Monmouth set sail to see if they could find the king. Whether either, or both, wondered for even the most fleeting moment whether Charles had drowned in a catastrophic shipwreck, which would have meant that James was already King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, will never be known. In fact, the Greyhound had lain to ‘in very rough weather’ off Dunnose Head until the morning of 1 July, when Charles got ashore in a shallop. He was met by the governor of the island, the outspoken, buccaneering old admiral Sir Robert Holmes, who took him off to a ‘good dinner’ at Yarmouth, where the Duke of York eventually caught up with him. Charles finally came into Portsmouth harbour at one in the morning on 2 July. The Venetian ambassador said of the king’s disappearance that ‘anxiety was universal’, and that his reappearance was greeted by ‘unspeakable relief’. Despite the alarm that had been caused, one courtier reported that ‘this stormy voyage has not at all discouraged his Majesty from the sea, and all he can be persuaded to is only to change his ship and return in the Harwich, a good Third Rate frigate, but he will by no means hearken to any proposition of returning by land, notwithstanding all manner of conveniences and supplications have been proposed to him’.

This dramatic voyage was by no means the only, nor the most ambitious, royal voyage of the reign. In July 1671, the king and Duke of York went overland to Portsmouth, where they viewed the new warships St Michael, Royal James and Edgar. They and their retinues then embarked in seven yachts, which, with six escorting warships, sailed for Plymouth, where they arrived on the seventeenth; the extended voyage also saw the royal flotilla call at Dartmouth. The king’s informality during this expedition startled many, and still ‘shocks historians accustomed to the near scripted progress of most baroque monarchs’; he arrived at Portsmouth unexpectedly early, and left Plymouth so abruptly that the mayor and corporation had to pursue him to Mount Edgecumbe in their own boat in order to take formal leave. Describing this voyage, the chief minister, the Earl of Arlington, said of his king (revealing a little of his nervousness in the process), ‘twenty leagues [by sea] are more pleasing to him than two by land. It is a new exploit for kings, but I hope God will bless him in it…’ 1677 saw another expedition to Plymouth. The royal party arrived at Portsmouth on 10 August, where the king and Duke of York inspected the new fortifications and the ships under construction in the dockyard, before sailing on to Plymouth, where they arrived on the sixteenth. The king inspected the Royal Citadel and dined at Mount Edgecumbe house before sailing for home on the eighteenth. So impressed was he by the experience that he vowed to repeat the trip every other year, and it has been suggested that only the subsequent political crisis of several years’ duration prevented him doing so.

As well as these substantial voyages, the king and his brother regularly sailed down the Thames to Sheerness or the Nore and back, outings so frequent that they rarely attracted any comment or attention at all. Moreover, these were not decadent pleasure cruises where downtrodden mariners worked the yacht while the king dallied with his latest mistress in the stern cabin. Charles and James often took the helms themselves, taking great delight in racing each other. On 1 October 1661, the diarist John Evelyn witnessed a race between the royal siblings:

I sailed this morning with His Majesty in one of his yachts (or pleasure boats), vessels not known among us till the Dutch East India Company [sic] presented that curious piece to the King, being very excellent sailing vessels. It was on a wager between his other new pleasure boat, built frigate-like, and one of the Duke of York’s, the wager £100; the race from Greenwich to Gravesend and back. The King lost it going, the wind being contrary, but saved stakes in returning. There were divers noble persons and lords on board, his Majesty sometimes steering himself. His barge and kitchen boat attended. I brake fast this morning with the King at return in his smaller vessel [the Bezan], he being pleased to take me and only four more, who were noblemen, with him, but dined in his yacht, where we all eat together with His Majesty.

‘Messing about on boats’ was an integral part of the macho, competitive culture of the Restoration court, along with the similarly energetic male pursuits of hunting, horse racing, and fornicating. So when one poet described King Charles in distinctly North Korean terms as Britain’s ‘great pilot’, he was using the term both literally and metaphorically.

Even so, the potentially history-changing implications of the royal passion for the sea were very real, even on the jaunts downriver. In July 1662, the king was caught

in a furious gale at the mouth of the Thames…the mast was broken, the sails torn, the sailors dismayed, and all in disorder he was thrown on the banks of Lie [sic; presumably Leigh-on-Sea in Essex]…and was obliged to stay there for several hours exposed to the fury of the waves, until the tide fell and the wind dropping, he could reach a safer place.

The dangers were illustrated even more dramatically by the loss of the Gloucester, on 6 May 1682. This was not some tiny, fragile royal yacht, but a powerful sixty-gun Third Rate man-of-war. She was carrying the Duke of York and a large party of courtiers back to Leith, where James was to retrieve his wife, left behind when their previous sojourn at Holyrood ended unexpectedly with his summons back to London. The voyage should have been routine, through one of the best known and most frequented seaways in British waters. But somehow, a catastrophic navigational error was made, and the ship struck the Lemon and Oare sandbank off Great Yarmouth. The mistake was largely James’ own fault: he seems to have taken command himself, having lost confidence in the Gloucester’s highly experienced pilot James Aires, and ordered a course change that proved fatal. About 130 passengers and crew were killed, including the Earl of Roxburgh, Lord Hopetoun, and James’ brother-in-law, James Hyde. Those who escaped included the Marquis of Montrose, Samuel Pepys (who was sailing in the escorting Katherine Yacht, not the Gloucester), and John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough. Above all, James, Duke of York, survived the shipwreck, albeit only just. He stayed aboard the ship until very nearly too late, and then had to climb out of one of the stern windows, with Churchill having at swordpoint to hold off the press of men trying to clamber into the duke’s boat. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is inescapable: the lives of Charles and James Stuart were threatened more immediately, and much more often, by the vagaries of the sea, than by the bullets and daggers of potential assassins.

Want to read the rest? Then get the book now, and don’t wait for the dodgy illegal Russian ‘free’ PDF that puts a virus on your laptop and destroys your hard drive! 

Medway 350, Day 3

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(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.

The Warship Anne

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This week, I’m delighted to welcome Richard Endsor as my guest blogger! Richard will be known to many of you as the leading authority on the design and construction of seventeenth century British warships. His book The Restoration Warship, focusing on the Third Rate Lenox of 1677, has justly become a classic, and has, indeed, inspired an ongoing campaign to build a modern replica of that great ship at Deptford, on the site of the dockyard where the original was built. He has a new ‘big book’ coming soon, as he explains at the end of this post, but he’s also found the time to produce a new work about the Lenox‘s sister ship Anne, the remains of which, exposed at particularly low tides at Pett Level on the Sussex coast, constitute the largest survival of King Charles II’s navy. I’ve visited the site myself and have blogged about it more than once on this website – have a look here and here. So now, over to Richard to explain more about his new book on the Anne!

***

Inspired by David Davies’s recent blog about his new book, Kings of the Sea, I asked him if he would be so kind and gracious enough to allow me to do a similar bit of blatant self-promotion for my own new book about the seventeenth century navy. Although we have long been friends with a similar interest, we are in no way rivals. He will, in his new book, brilliantly grasp the overall view of the Navy as if he were himself, a long serving Lord of the Admiralty. [Note: I’ve paid him absolutely nothing for this bit, honestly – D] I on the other hand, am down in the dirty dockyard worrying about scarphing of futtocks and how ships were built. Our previous non-fiction works, Pepys’s Navy and Restoration Warship, which came out at about the same time a few years ago, complemented each other.

My new book, The Warship Anne, will similarly complement Kings of the Sea. Work started on it a couple of months after a conference “All about the Anne” was held in July last year at St Clement’s Church, Hastings. Needless to say, David Davies attended and was a sparkling speaker at the event. [Nor for this bit – D] The Warship Anne book is 160 pages long and 250mm square, or nearly 10 inches in old fogies’ terms. It contains about images 150 images, all in full colour of which about 100 were created by me.  I completed the book in only nine months and my publisher, Bloomsbury, with whom it has been such a pleasure to work with, reckon they will have it on the bookstands by 25 February next year. Please don’t gasp in admiration at this remarkable productivity as I have been researching and painting the Anne over a period of some 25 years. I am involved in the Anne as the technical historian for the Warship Anne Trust which owns her, a subsidiary of the Nautical Museum’s Trust. The Trust also runs the Shipwreck Museum in Hastings. The book was written to publicise the surviving remains of the ship as widely as possible. I am so grateful to Bloomsbury who have helped a great deal by keeping the retail price down to only £25 a copy.

The Anne is sometimes visible at low tide at Pett Level, near Hastings and is one of the most important shipwrecks along the southern coast of England. The whole of the lower hull survives intact, as shown in the second image, and is the most substantial known remaining shipwreck from the Navy of Charles II and Samuel Pepys. She was lost in 1690 after the Battle of Beachy Head, while defending the country from invasion. Sadly, her remains and the men who died aboard her are now largely forgotten. The battle prevented a French invasion which, had it been successful, would have dramatically and permanently changed English and European history.  The exiled Catholic King James II would have been restored to the throne, his Catholic faith almost certainly imposed and the country dominated by the French.

Although the importance of Beachy Head ranks alongside the Armada Campaign and the Battle of Trafalgar, it was not a glorious victory to celebrate and be remembered. In fact the outnumbered English and Dutch allies were forced into ignominious retreat during which the dismasted Anne was run ashore between Rye and Hastings.  She became the only English loss when she was burnt to prevent capture.

My book follows the history of the Anne in chronological order. The first chapter deals with the events that led up to her building in 1678 as part of a new fleet of 30 ships. A fleet that would see the start of the British Navy’s domination the world’s oceans until the end of the days of sail. The ships were built a few years after the end of the third Dutch war. A war that was pursued by King Charles after the Dutch made their famous raid on Chatham dockyard at the end of the second Dutch war. The Dutch raid on Chatham followed the less famous English attack on the Dutch merchant fleet in the Vlie, known as Holmes’s bonfire. If you’re Dutch, it might be best if you skip the rest of this chapter as I found, to my surprise, that the damage done by Holmes’s bonfire was much greater than the damage done by the Dutch raid on Chatham. Not only that, but it caused the enraged Charles II to join the French and pursue the third Dutch war to the ruin of the Dutch economy. I reckon the Chatham raid was the Dutch ‘Pearl Harbor’ and it turned out to be as much a disaster for them as it was for the Japanese. A controversial view I know, but I examined the losses in terms of the well documented value of ships, something which appears not to have been done before.

In the second chapter, Phineas Pett II who built the Anne, offers himself as a character whom a fiction author would have difficulty inventing. [We’ll see! – D] A likeable rogue who lets his perceived success go to his head to the annoyance of all those about him: except King Charles, with whom he has much in common. He receives an amusing come-uppance came at the hands of Mrs Elizabeth Brooker to whom his wife owed money. Just as interesting is the building of the Anne. The delays and difficulty Pett had in finding keel pieces were found in the extensive historic record as were many, many other details of the ship’s construction. The most rewarding discovery for me, was recently finding and being able to interpret the actual recorded lines of a sister ship of the Anne, built by Pett to the same draught. From them a reconstructed draught of the Anne was made, which is of course included in the book.  Also printed across two pages is an image of the contemporary model of another sister ship, probably the Elizabeth. The image is photographic but all the distortions of perspective have been removed so that it is a true draught. Also included are the ship’s recorded hull lines traced from the models frames. The book also includes the complete draughts of another of the 30 ships made by Thomas Fagge in about 1680.

Chapter three and four takes the reader through the history of the Anne up until 1688. After launch, she and all the other new ships suffered from decay and repairs were made led by a commission under Samuel Pepys. There followed a voyage in 1687 when she acted as the flagship of a small fleet taking a German princess to Lisbon to marry the King of Portugal. From there she went on into the Mediterranean to confirm peace treaties with the Barbary States and negotiate the release of slaves. With the serious business finished, she visited the Grand Harbour, Malta, a view of which is shown on the book cover painting. During her voyage all sorts of stories emerge: King James’s fascination with Anne’s troublesome experimental pumps, special moveable steps made for the queen to leave Anne with dignity, John Shaw from the Pearl being tried aboard for murder, and a girl slave named Sarah Hawkins freed and her name entered into the Anne’s pay book. The most significant series of events for the ship was the continuing failure of her rotten masts and rigging. Some of the most important ropes stretched and became an inch thinner in circumference. The tops of the masts split for which special iron hoops had to be made to strengthen them. Pepys was ultimately responsible as his commission had supposedly repaired the ship. It resulted in a bitter dispute between him and Cloudesley Shovel, the Anne’s captain, which reveals how devious Pepys could be. He set up his own enquiry, which unsurprisingly found that no ship could be better fitted out.

The following chapter, chapter five, concerns the Battle of Beachy Head. It is painful to read of the damage inflicted on both the French and English ships near the head of the Blue squadron where the Anne was stationed.  Exposed and outnumbered, she was gradually shot to pieces until her masts were lost. Twenty nine men were killed while awful wounds were inflicted on 41 others. Even after all this time, some of the sadness suffered by the men’s families can still be felt. Barbra Cunningham from Jarrow was pregnant when her husband, Thomas, joined the Anne as an Able Seaman. He was killed in the battle before Barbra gave birth. Barbra named her baby daughter Thomasin, in honour of her dead father.

I was lucky in that so much documentation remains concerning the guns of the Anne. Magnificent brass guns were given to her when she went to the Mediterranean with a reduced armament of 62 guns. The 70 iron guns used at Beachy Head are also recorded and I have produced many drawings showing them and their gun carriages, as well as drawings showing where the guns were mounted. Two guns survive today that probably served aboard her.

Finally, the last chapter deals with the Anne today, the archaeology and the hopes for preserving her. I also cover the extent of her remains and ownership by the Warship Anne Trust. Lengthy appendices give details of all the timbers used in ships of her type, together with the transcription of a contract for building a similar ship.

With The Warship Anne book completed, I have returned to my long term project. This is The Master Shipwright’s Secrets, a work dealing with the practices used by the master shipwrights when designing ships. The book is very nearly finished and with any luck, will also be out next year.

Kings on the Way

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Cue drum roll… I’m delighted to be able to announce that my new non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, has gone off to Seaforth Publishing, and should be published next summer. And here, for the first time online, is the cover –

In many ways, I feel that Kings of the Sea marks the culmination of the work I’ve done on the Restoration navy over more than thirty years. The book radically reassesses the working relationship of three men, and their contributions to the history of the navy – the men in question being Kings Charles and James, and the great naval administrator who served them both, Samuel Pepys. It also challenges some of the assessments of the two kings which appear in some of the principal studies of their lives, and aims to confront head-on the still common assumption that it is perfectly possible to write a major history of Britain during the late seventeenth century which effectively ignores the navy. So the book is often provocative, sometimes controversial, and doesn’t pull its punches. I’m expecting it to raise eyebrows and hackles in equal measure!

One of the other things I’ve tried to do in the book is to set the attitudes to naval matters of Charles and James in the context of the Stuart dynasty’s entire relationship with the sea. So the first chapter examines the Scottish monarchs of the line, and their sometimes remarkable involvement in naval warfare, especially under James IV and James V. This chapter also covers James VI and I’s English reign, often seen as a ‘dark age’ of naval history. In the second chapter, I take a look at Charles I, the Sovereign of the Seas, and the early seafaring experiences of his sons, Charles and James; the chapter ends just after the Restoration, with the astonishing naval elements of Charles II’s coronation procession.

In the third chapter, I analyse the ship naming policy of the royal brothers – and if that sounds dull, it’s anything but! This chapter takes some material originally published on this blog and expands it considerably, looking at the ways in which the choice of ship names was incredibly political, and actually remarkably revealing of the Stuarts’ thinking about political issues at different points in their reigns. Chapter Four goes on to study the extent and nature of the royal brothers’ interest in, and technical knowledge of, the art of shipbuilding, concentrating particularly on Charles. I have to admit to a particular soft spot for Chapter Five, which looks at the use of the royal yachts – and many of the uses are very far removed from what we might expect of vessels traditionally described as ‘pleasure boats’! In fact, the story of the yachts casts unexpected light on some ‘hidden histories’ of the reigns of the Stuart monarchs, and reveals some startling new evidence about, for instance, Charles II’s attitude to Catholics during the ‘Exclusion Crisis’.

In Chapter Six, ‘Governing the Navy’, I look at the roles of both Charles and James in naval administration, and how they interacted with Pepys. This chapter is connected to an appendix, and taken together, they provide a radical new interpretation of how the navy was actually run during the Restoration age. Chapter Seven takes me back to my most familiar stamping ground of all, the officer corps of the Stuart navy. But after all these years, I’ve found plenty of new things to say about it, to ask questions that I didn’t ask when I first worked on the subject, and to present answers that have sometimes startled me, let alone any potential readers.

Chapters Eight and Nine are, in some ways, the heart of the book’s line of argument. They focus on the claim of seventeenth century monarchs to be ‘sovereigns of the seas’ around Britain’s coasts; but whereas this theme has often been approached from a legalistic angle, I concentrate on the ways in which this claim generated incessant clashes with many other states, and, above all, the ways in which it made the Stuarts’ relationship with France rather more fraught than is sometimes assumed. But it was also a part of a wider agenda which embraced overseas colonies, the activities of the Royal Society, voyages of exploration, and even the establishment of the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital – all themes which are analysed here.

Chapter Ten, ‘Warlords’, does what it says on the tin, and analyses the roles of Charles and James as war leaders. To what extent were the strategic blunders of the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars the fault of the former, and the tactical failings of the wars the fault of the latter? The chapter reassesses such momentous events as the Battle of Solebay (1672) and places them in the context of the Stuarts’ personal ambitions. In Chapter Eleven, James finally takes the stage on his own, as King – and although I’ve written detailed studies of the navy’s part in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ twice before, I was still slightly taken aback by the amount of new evidence I was able to unearth, and the very different perspectives that these gave me.

Finally, Chapter Twelve returns to the overarching theme of ‘the Stuarts and the Sea’, and looks at ‘The Jacobite Navy’. And before you all chorus ‘there’s no such thing!’ (‘oh yes there is!’…etc), the naval side of the Jacobite movement is actually fundamentally important to any understanding of the entire subject – after all, and to put in the crudest possible terms, how, exactly, were the Old and Young Pretenders and their supporters meant to physically get to the British Isles? I had huge fun with this chapter, and managed to work in mentions – and relevant mentions to boot! – of Nelson, Blackbeard, Irish poetry, Peter the Great, and my old friends the Stepney family.

So all in all, I’m reasonably pleased with the way Kings of the Sea has turned out. It’ll also be lavishly illustrated, thanks to the wonderful people at Seaforth Publishing, and I’ve taken the opportunity to include plenty of images that, to the best of my knowledge, haven’t previously been seen in an English language book. So if you’re one of those unbelievably efficient people who’s already completed their Christmas shopping for this year, may I recommend Kings of the Sea to you for your 2017 list?

‘We’ve Got Pepys Bang to Rights This Time,’ said Morse

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Every now and again, a historian comes across something which is so far from left field that it’s actually from a completely different farm. That’s certainly the case with the discovery made a few years back by my friend and colleague, Richard Endsor, author of The Restoration Warship. As he’s doing a ‘star turn’ next weekend, dressing up as master shipwright John Shish for London Open House at the glorious Master Shipwright’s House in Deptford, on behalf of the project to build a replica of the 1677 Third Rate Lenox on the adjacent site, I thought it would be a suitable opportunity to highlight his remarkable ‘find’. And there’ll be more excitement on this blog next Monday, when I’ll have a guest post from Victoria Yee of the University of St Andrews on the Welsh soldiers and sailors who fought in the Thirty Years War. Vicki has unearthed some fantastic material, so it’ll be a must for all of you interested in seventeenth century and/or Welsh history!

In the meantime, though…

On 5 March 1674, the Navy Board received a letter from Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty Commission, a position he had held for only eight months since his promotion from his previous position as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. The letter itself is not remarkable, being a request at the suggestion of Captain Henry Killigrew to appoint one Benjamin Holmes as Master of Killigrew’s ship, the Swan. What is interesting is the signature, for it appears to contain the partial patent index fingerprint from Pepys’s right hand. It seems likely that, when forming the lower curved section of the capital ‘P’, his pen flicked a quantity of ink to the left, part of which landed on his finger. Then, as he finished writing, his wet finger left the impression on the paper. Also noticeable are the tiny reflective particles added to the ink for decoration.

And so, ladies and gentlemen…cue drum roll…we give you the fingerprint of Samuel Pepys!

[National Archives, Kew, ADM106/31]