J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Samuel Pepys

Pepys Into the Past

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Last Friday, I was round at the Pepyses’ place. You know the Pepyses? Husband’s a civil servant, bit of a lad, eye for the women, always blogging? Wife’s half-French and a bit scatty? That’s right, those Pepyses. And I’m talking about their bijou pad in the country, not their place in town. Cute little place, bit of land attached, good transport links, decent local school – I mean, its most famous old boy became head of state, for goodness sake –

OK, this is one of the problems with writing fiction: the temptation to fictionalise what should be a purely factual blog occasionally proves too strong. But it’s very easy to visit Pepys House at Brampton, Cambridgeshire, and imagine Sam and Elizabeth as a modern-day metropolitan couple, escaping at weekends to their delightful little country cottage, where they’d merrily quaff Chardonnay on the terrace. The front wing of the house is the part that they would have known, a sturdy early 17th century yeoman’s house; a somewhat larger building was attached to the back in the 18th century. The house was owned by Sam’s uncle Robert, who worked for the powerful Montagu family just up the road at Hinchingbrooke, and was inherited by Sam’s father John. It’s likely that young Sam lived there for at least a couple of years in his childhood, when he attended nearby Huntingdon Grammar School (star alumnus = O. Cromwell), and in the 1660s he installed his parents and his sister Paulina there. Sam visited from time to time, and occasionally sent his much put-upon wife Elizabeth to stay with her father-in-law (the two didn’t get on). On 9 October 1667, he wrote in his diary that he found the house and garden ‘very pretty, especially the little parlour and the summer houses in the garden, only the wall doth want greens upon it, [but] the house is too low-roofed, but [this] is only because of my coming from a house of higher ceilings, but altogether very pretty, and I did bless God that I am able to have such a pretty place to retire to…’ On another occasion, though, he complained of ‘the biting of the gnats by night’ – Brampton being on the edge of the flat, wet, marshy landscape of the Fens.

Pepys House, Brampton
Pepys House, Brampton

The house’s most memorable appearance in the diary comes slightly earlier in 1667, when the Dutch fleet was in the Thames, attacking the dockyard at Chatham, and there seemed to be a very real prospect of invasion. On 13 June, with news of the taking of the Royal Charles ringing in his ears, Pepys despatched to Brampton his wife, father, the four bound volumes of his diary to date, and some £1300 in gold. In October he went up to retrieve the money, which his wife and father had buried in the garden. There followed a hilarious three-way spat in the night-time, illuminated only by a single lantern, with John and Elizabeth arguing over exactly where they had buried it while Sam got more and more anxious and angry: ‘but Lord, what a toss I was in for some time in, that they could not justly tell where it was, that I begun heartily to sweat and be angry that they should not agree better upon the place, and at last to fear that it was gone’. Even when they finally found the right place, he berated them for not burying it deeper in the ground, and choosing a spot that was overlooked by neighbours. Worse, the damp conditions had caused the bags to burst, leading to the loss of about 100 gold pieces, ‘which did make me mad’. Desperate to prevent the neighbours – who, he thought, were bound to have heard the nocturnal argument in the garden – sneaking in and finding the missing coins, Pepys went out again and managed to retrieve another 45. Several subsequent expeditions have failed to locate any of Pepys’s missing gold!

The house is currently on a long lease to the Samuel Pepys Club, which was founded in 1903 to perpetuate the diarist’s memory. Initially restricted to 70 members, a number corresponding to his age when he died, it subsequently expanded to 140, although membership remains by personal application, supported by a proposer and seconder from within the club, followed by election. The membership includes a number of overseas members, but all are united by their interest in aspects of Pepys’s life and times. I joined several years ago, had the honour to receive the Samuel Pepys Award (which was instituted by the Club) in 2009, and currently serve on the committee; indeed, it was a meeting that took me to the house. This remedied an utterly shocking and shameful omission on my part – although I’ve lived within 20 miles of Pepys House for over 25 years now, in fact for almost as long as I’ve been working on Pepys and the navy of his day, I’d never actually visited it before. Because it is possible to visit it, although finding out how to do so is a significant test of initiative! The house itself is identified only by the tiniest of name plates on a gate post, while the visitor information is tucked away on the somewhat rickety website of the Samuel Pepys Club. But I thoroughly recommend it – the delightful tenants, Mr and Mrs Curtis, will entertain you royally, while a visit to Brampton can easily be combined with one to Huntingdon’s Cromwell Museum, housed in the school building that Pepys and Oliver Cromwell attended, and to Hinchingbrooke House, the mansion of the Montagu family, including Pepys’s patron, the first Earl of Sandwich (the house is now a school – indeed, I had my first ever job interview there! – but is open on certain days during the holidays). And if you do go, say hello to the Pepyses for me!

Pepys Show

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I was going to have a week off blogging. After doing five posts in a week for the Orkney and Shetland road trip, then another extra one to mark the rediscovery of King Richard III, I thought I deserved to put my feet up, or at most to do a nice short light-hearted post about hunting for other lost royal corpses (I bags King Offa; he’s rumoured to be somewhere near the bar of Bedford Rowing Club).

Then, of course, Michael Gove produced the new draft National Curriculum for History.

Now, as regular readers of this blog will know, I don’t do politics. After all, I don’t want to lose a huge tranche of followers by nailing my colours to any mast whatsoever. Some of you will think Mr Gove is the greatest thing since sliced bread; others will think he’s Satan’s spokesman on childcare. Those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will already be getting ready to surf off elsewhere in search of blogs about rugby, because since devolution, Mr Gove’s remit extends only to England’s green and pleasant land. Those in other continents will be thinking ‘Goddarn (for that, I understand, is how Americans speak; I watched countless episodes of Bonanza), another introverted Brit-orientated post’.

But bear with me.

I don’t want to consider how likely it is that five year olds will be able to obtain a sound understanding of the concepts of civilisation and democracy, as the new curriculum enjoins. I don’t want to get into the whole argument about whether an exclusive concentration on British history alone from the ages of 7 to 14 is a good or a bad thing. However, as someone who taught History in the secondary sector for the best part of 30 years, and even taught 9 and 10 year olds on occasions, I can say with some confidence that anyone who thinks you can cover the whole of British history from the Stone Age to the fall of Thatcher (sorry, read ‘Berlin Wall’ – oh no, just checked the text again, re-insert ‘Thatcher’) in seven years in the amount of time allocated to History is, shall we say, several horses short of a lasagne.

No.

I want to concentrate on just one line of the new curriculum; a line that gladdened my heart at first reading. There it is, my friends, in black and white, as one of the things that pupils are expected to learn at the end of Key Stage Two (so roughly at the age of ten): Samuel Pepys and the Establishment of the Royal Navy. Finally, we have formal recognition of the seventeenth century navy! Finally, everyone will know about the importance of Pepys and the fleet of his day, the very theme I’ve worked on for all these long years, and which now forms the backdrop for the Quinton Journals! (Hmm, think of all those potential new readers…think of the royalties…) Finally, all British schoolchildren will – oh, except for the ones in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, of course. And the English ones in academies, which don’t have to follow the National Curriculum. And the English ones in independent schools, which don’t either.

And that’s just the first of the problems with what should have been a piece of unquestionably good news for this blogger and his readers.

Let’s dig just a little deeper beneath that one line of the new curriculum, hopefully not unearthing any lost monarchs in the process. Now, I’ve actually taught children about Samuel Pepys – many, many times. He was actually in the old National Curriculum, albeit primarily as a source for the Plague and Great Fire of London. I’ve taught him to 9 year olds, to 13 year olds, and to 18 year olds, and for all of them, without exception, the first reaction to hearing his name is one of profound hilarity. Obviously, the sophistication of the humour varies: 9 year olds love the fact that the name sounds like ‘Pee’; 18 year olds love the fact that ‘Pepys’ could hardly be a better name for a voyeur who loved groping women (and yes, OK, they, too, love the fact that the name sounds like ‘Pee’). But once we got past the lavatorial humour, students of all ages loved Pepys for his vivid descriptions of dramatic events, the immediacy of his diary, and the attractiveness of his personality: in other words, all the aspects of Pepys that teachers are now meant to jettison in favour of studying his role in the establishment of the Royal Navy.

Ah, you say, but hang on a minute, you said a little earlier that this was a cause for rejoicing- after all, you’ve spent thirty years working on it!

Well, yes and no. I’ve actually spent thirty years disproving the notion that Samuel Pepys was responsible for the establishment of the Royal Navy. That institution was created – ‘established’, if you prefer – by one or more out of Kings Alfred the Great, Edgar, John, Edward III or Henry VIII, depending on which historians one reads; even in Pepys’s own day, Charles II and his brother James, first as Duke of York and then as Lord High Admiral, were more responsible for conceiving the important reforms that did indeed establish the navy as a permanent, professional fighting service. The notion that the Royal Navy was ‘established’ in this period harks back to Sir Arthur Bryant’s famous three-volume biography of Pepys from the 1930s, and was discredited well before I started working on the period.

But there’s a more significant problem. Let’s bear with the flawed assumption for a moment and have our ten year olds learning about Pepys and the establishment of the Royal Navy. To do that effectively, they have to know what the Royal Navy is. They have to know what any navy is. For goodness sake, you might be thinking, surely every ten year old knows what a navy is! Unfortunately, no, they don’t. About three or four years ago, for example, I gave a presentation to eleven year olds at one of the most eminent and famous public schools in the country – not the one that produces Prime Ministers on a conveyor belt, but very much in the same league. A significant number of the pupils genuinely had no idea what a navy was, and many had never heard of Horatio Nelson; and this was in a city that had once been one of the nation’s leading ports, and had several famous warships named after it. So now we’re no longer talking about one lesson to learn about Pepys and the navy, but at least one background lesson, ideally more, to explain the entire concept of a navy from first principles.

And there’s the rub. The same flawed thinking can be found time and time again throughout the draft National Curriculum. It contains some blatant pushing of outdated, subjective historical theories (e.g. Pepys establishing the navy, or the reference to ‘the Heptarchy’ in Anglo-Saxon England, a concept that’s been discredited for decades). Then there’s the complete failure of what’s meant to be solely the English national curriculum to distinguish clearly between English and British history; its nods towards Scots, Irish and Welsh history are frankly risible and might as well be omitted. All of this is combined with a seemingly total lack of awareness of the amount of time this material will actually take to teach, and that’s even before we consider the fact that the entirely chronological nature of the curriculum, taught in sequence between the ages of seven and fourteen, will mean that Pepys and the navy – indeed, absolutely everything before 1700 – will never be taught by a specialist History teacher.

No, I don’t do politics. But I really, really wish that when it comes to the teaching of History in schools, politicians of all persuasions in all countries would do common sense.

 

Saints and Soldiers: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c.1660-c.1714, Part 3.

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Time for the third and final part of my discussion of warship naming under the later Stuarts. This topic has generated some interesting discussion, so I hope to return to it one day, particularly as more and more interesting connections keep coming out of the woodwork. For example, and despite the fact that the information is available in Warlow’s book on Royal Navy shore establishments, I’d never really registered the fact that some of the most illustrious Stuart warship names, like Royal Charles, Royal James and Royal Prince, were revived for some of the bases established in liberated France and Germany at the end of World War II, and that the historically aware ships’ names committee of the day even added Royal Rupert. At the National Archives last Friday, I also had a look at the papers relating to the establishment in 1945 of HMS Pepys as the shore base for the Far East Fleet at Manus in the Philippines, plus some evidence suggesting that George V didn’t only reject Oliver Cromwell as a battleship name in 1911 but also vetoed Hero for some reason. Moreover, my statement in last week’s post that the navy never had a second ship called St Michael was very nearly wrong; it seems that the ‘fleet submarines’ contemplated in 1925 were to have been given saints’ names, and St Michael would have been the third of these. (The first two would have been St George and St Andrew, also revivals of great 17th century warship names, although there was also a strong campaign to use the name St Christopher too.)

But back to the seventeenth century and some real ships with real names! First, just to clarify one of the points in last week’s post – Pepys’s letter to the Navy Board on 14 April 1679 makes it clear that Charles II had given the name Sandwich to the Third Rate building at Deptford by mistake, as he had ‘from the first design of building the thirty ships determined upon conferring it upon one of the Second Rates out of the regard he is pleased out of his great goodness he bears to the memory of the late noble lord of that name’, so he ordered the Third to be renamed Hope and the Second building at Harwich to be named Sandwich. So – simultaneous proof that Charles II did have a rough plan for the names of at least some of the thirty ships from the very beginning, and that his memory sometimes failed him!

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King James II and VII named few ships during his brief reign, but those that he did select are deeply revealing of the king’s thinking and of the personality flaws that cost him his throne. The last of the ‘thirty new ships’, launched on 23 May 1685, was naturally named Coronation after the event that took place exactly thirty days earlier. Three Fourth Rates were launched in 1687; these were named Deptford, Sedgemoor and St Albans. The Sedgemoor harked back to the naming policy of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when many ships were named after parliamentary victories of the civil war; but both then and in 1687, naming ships after battles in which Englishmen killed Englishmen was hardly a gesture of tolerance and reconciliation. Instead, the name Sedgemoor shows James exulting in his military triumph, and by doing so undoubtedly sending out a subliminal message to other potential rebels. (On the other hand, James did not change the name of the Monmouth; this contrasts with the situation in 1715, when the name of the new Fourth Rate Ormonde was swiftly changed to Dragon following the second Duke of Ormonde’s defection to the Jacobites.) The seemingly bland name St Albans, nominally honouring the town in Hertfordshire, is more likely to have been a reference to England’s first Christian martyr, and might have presaged a succession of other ‘saintly’ ship names if James’s Catholic rule had continued (thus corresponding more closely to naming policy in France and especially in Spain); limited confirmation of this might be the renaming of the Charles as the St George in October 1687, when the old Second Rate of that name was discarded.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-9, which saw the overthrow of James and the installation of his daughter Mary and son-in-law William as joint monarchs, was not accompanied by an immediate mass renaming of the fleet as had taken place in 1660. The legal and emotional ambiguities of James’s alleged ‘abdication’ of his thrones, with many of even the new regime’s supporters having doubts about its legitimacy, led to caution and an awareness of sensibilities; even the Royal James retained its name until 3 March 1691, when it was renamed Victory. Moreover, in 1660 the incoming regime took the view that all public acts of its predecessor were not only illegal, but were entirely null and void, as shown by the insistence on counting that year as the twelfth of the reign of King Charles II. There was no equivalent attempt to cancel an entire period of history after 1688; no-one denied that the reigns of Charles and James had happened[i]. The only other significant renamings of William’s reign and the early part of Anne’s took place when ships were rebuilt, and an opportunity was taken to acknowledge the new political realities. Thus in 1692 the Royal Prince became the Royal William, in 1693 the Royal Charles was renamed Queen for Mary II (there was already a Mary and a Mary Galley, so presumably Royal Mary would have caused too much confusion), in 1701 the Duke became the Prince George and in 1703 the St Andrew became the Royal Anne. Finally, the Albemarle was renamed Union on 29 December 1709 to commemorate the new Anglo-Scottish polity. However, the largest single batch of renamings of major warships before the Hanoverian succession occurred on 18 December 1706, when no fewer than three Second Rates were renamed to reflect the triumphs of the Duke of Marlborough: the St Michael became the Marlborough, the Royal Katherine became the Ramillies, while the Windsor Castle, which had already changed its name in short order from Princess Anne and previously from Duchess, became the Blenheim. These changes were undoubtedly part of the shower of rewards heaped upon Marlborough’s head when he returned to Britain on 26 November 1706 after the triumphant Ramillies campaign; his brother George, effective head of the Admiralty under Prince George of Denmark, was in a position to facilitate what must surely rank as the most notable naval tribute ever paid to a soldier[ii].

The great majority of new builds of the post-1689 era were seemingly given neutral geographical names, such as Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Cumberland and Torbay, all names that were repeated time and time again down the years. However, a few of these had a double meaning, for some, like Shrewsbury and Pembroke, also represented the titles of great political figures of the late Stuart regime, while Torbay, of course, was where William had landed on 5 November 1688. A small number of great ships were given names that harked back to the more overtly partisan and triumphalist policies of earlier eras: these included Association, named after the popular movement of 1696 that took oaths of loyalty in response to an assassination attempt on William III, Barfleur after Admiral Russell’s great victory over the French in 1692, and Boyne after William’s victory in Ireland in 1690. The question of who actually decided on the names of ships after the Glorious Revolution is also much less clear. The first warships launched in William’s reign were a group of five fifth rates, launched between December 1689 and March 1691, but it is apparent that the king could not have been personally responsible for naming most of these as he was campaigning in Ireland for much of that time. However, there is evidence to suggest that the Admiralty, too, did not name the larger ships (although it does seem to have named smaller ones), in which case it seems highly likely that at least some of the names were decided upon by William’s wife, and equal co-monarch, Queen Mary II.

(Finally, big ‘thank you’s’ to Rif Winfield, whose tremendous magnum opus on British warships in the age of sail provided much of the information on dates, etc, and to Richard Endsor, Frank Fox and Peter Le Fevre, who contributed much invaluable information and many stimulating ideas during our email exchanges about the subject matter in the three blogs on this topic.)

[i] However, it is interesting to speculate on whether the name Sedgemoor would have been retained; but that ship was lost on 2 January 1689, before the new regime was established. As it was, many names that were essentially personal to Charles and James were retained: these included the Coronation and the yachts named after Charles’s mistresses, such as the Fubbs and Cleveland.

[ii] The Duke of Wellington has had more ships named after himself and his victories (including the present HMS Iron Duke), but certainly not three on the same day.

A Hope and A Sandwich: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c1660-c1714, Part 2

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Back to post-Olympics reality! As promised, today’s post is the second part of my study of post-1660 warship names, originally intended for publication in an academic journal. I originally thought that this would be the concluding part, but I think the remaining material is too long for just one post, so I’ll postpone the conclusion until next week when I’ll actually be in north Wales on another research trip. However, I’ve also just realised that today, 13 August, marks the first anniversary of this Gentleman and Tarpaulins blog! I can’t really believe it’s been a year…just where did the time go? It would be remiss of me to let the occasion pass without thanking you, my readers, for your support over the past year, and for your stimulating and always greatly appreciated comments. As for future plans… Over the autumn and winter I’ll be building up to the publication of my latest books, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales and the fourth title in the Quinton series, The Lion of Midnight, so there’ll be plenty of posts tied in to them. I have a few ideas for the rest of the summer, notably an account of my sometimes surreal experiences as an officer in the RNR (CCF), but please let me know if there are any topics related to my writing or naval history generally that you’d like me to cover. Also, I’ve been wondering about having the occasional guest blogger; would people welcome this or not? I’d love to have your feedback!

Anyway, on with the matter in hand…

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In 1677 Parliament voted for the funds for a huge new construction programme of thirty ships, intended to eliminate the French navy’s perceived superiority in numbers, and the ships began to be named and launched from the spring of 1678 onwards. The first three names were essentially personal to Charles. Lenox was named after Charles, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, his illegitimate son by the Duchess of Portsmouth and thus by extension probably honours the mother as well, as the names Richmond and Portsmouth were already taken. The idiosyncratic spelling seems to have been Charles’s own, as both the ducal patent and all historical precedents spell the name ‘nn’. (A project has been launched to build a replica of Lenox at Deptford, inspired by the outstanding book on the ship by my good friend Richard Endsor.) The second, Restoration, was launched on 28 May 1678, the day before the eighteenth anniversary of the event her name commemorated. The third was named Hampton Court; arguably an unusual choice as Charles spent little time there, although he and Catherine of Braganza had honeymooned there in 1662. The Captain (July 1678) was presumably named in honour of the Duke of Monmouth, who had been appointed captain-general of the English army in April.

Before the next batch of ships was launched, the ‘Popish Plot’ had erupted. It is possible that Charles responded to this by selecting names that pandered more to Protestant and patriotic sentiment: hence Anne in November 1678, to honour a Protestant and legitimate member of the king’s family, Windsor Castle, after one of the monarchy’s most obvious symbols, and three names that recalled the Elizabethan navy, Eagle, Vanguard and Elizabeth itself. The Hope, launched on 3 March 1679, also recalled the triumph against the Spanish Armada (a galleon of that name had fought in the action), but the timing of the launch suggests that the name might have had a double meaning, possibly to reflect the optimism surrounding the meeting of the first new parliament for eighteen years (it opened on the 6th); this was short-lived, as relations between Charles and this parliament rapidly deteriorated. This might also provide an explanation for the suggestion that the Hope was originally intended to be named Sandwich. The new name, reflecting a very brief moment of optimism in national politics and Charles II’s own thinking, could have been assigned to the ship at short notice, with the original name of Sandwich then being reassigned to one of the hulls that would be launched a few weeks later.

No fewer than seven ships were named in May 1679, the month when Charles’s difficult relationship with the ‘first exclusion parliament’ culminated in its prorogation. One, the Sandwich, recalled an architect of the Restoration who had been killed at the same time of year, seven years before. Grafton was named after another of the king’s illegitimate sons; she was followed in June by Northumberland, named after his brother. Duchess might have been named for the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, so her naming might have been a subtle gesture of defiance against the exclusionists; an alternative candidate would be the Duchess of Portsmouth, which would have been equally provocative. (Of course, it is equally possible that the name simply recognised the generic title.) Kent and Essex seem to be purely geographical names, honouring counties which made particularly substantial contributions to the Royal Navy, and they also revived the names of warships lost earlier in the reign. On the other hand, the name Essex might have had a double meaning which could have been a gesture towards Charles’s opponents – Arthur, Earl of Essex, was a key figure in the newly remodelled Privy Council that was meant to bring about national reconciliation (and his brother was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time), while the navy’s previous Essex had been named after Parliament’s captain-general in the Civil War.

The other ships launched in the summer of 1679 were the Berwick (May) and Stirling Castle (July). These seemingly odd choices, given Charles II’s well-known dislike of Scotland and its environs, might have been a response to the almost exactly contemporary covenanter rebellion that culminated in the battle of Bothwell Brig, i.e. emphasising the strength of the fortresses that faced potential rebels and thus by implication the strength of royal control of Scotland; the name Stirling Castle in particular could be an assertion of royal rule after the defeat of that rebellion, by choosing the name of one of the most obvious symbols of that rule in Scotland.

The two names given in September 1679, Expedition and Bredah, were fairly neutral, although the latter can only be a reference back to the Declaration of Breda in 1660 – a fairly odd name to choose at that point given the suspicion of Charles for failing to implement the terms he had agreed in that document, but with a new parliament due to meet in October (although it was later postponed), one that was again likely to be heavily influenced by urban dissenter opinion, it might have been his way of suggesting that he would now be more inclusive towards dissent, as he had originally promised at Breda.  The Burford, launched in November 1679, reverted to type in the sense that it was named after one of his illegitimate sons – but interestingly, it was not named after the eldest of the brood still not to have a ship named after him, the Duke of Southampton (who actually never received this honour, perhaps suggesting that Charles was never wholly confident of the paternity that he had acknowledged in 1670), but after a mere earl, his son by Nell Gwyn, ‘the Protestant whore’, so perhaps once more this was actually a subtle nod toward Protestant sensibilities. Pendennis was launched on 25 December 1679, shortly after Shaftesbury and the whigs began a campaign of petitioning to demand that the exclusion parliament should be allowed to sit. This name might have been a gesture of defiance by Charles toward his critics – Pendennis Castle was the last garrison in England to hold out for Charles I during the civil war, so the name might reflect a determination to persist against overwhelming odds and regardless of the consequences. When added to Windsor Castle, Stirling Castle and Berwick, there certainly seems to be some sort of running theme of deliberately linking ship names to the great fortresses of the kingdoms, i.e. the strongholds that existed to suppress discontent.

In the spring of 1680 Charles seemed to return to purely geographical names, christening two ships the Exeter and Suffolk. It is difficult to see a political rationale behind these names, but there is less difficulty with the other 1680 launch; in October, the month when parliament was finally due to convene, he named the Albemarle, recollecting another great figure of the restoration. Following the dissolution of the third exclusion parliament in March 1681, Charles could again select ship names that did not pander to or respond to the broader political situation, and which reflected his own aspirations. Thus he named the Ossory after one of his recently deceased close friends, the Duke probably in honour of his brother James, whose place in the succession had now been secured, and the Britannia and Neptune, reflecting the broader concern to assert his sovereignty over the seas that had been apparent since his restoration.

Of course, all of this begs a question – had Charles mapped out a rough, or even a pretty precise, idea of what he was going to call at least some of the thirty ships when the programme commenced, or did he make it up as he went along? Clearly some of the names were responses to events that couldn’t possibly have been envisaged in 1677-8 (Ossory, Coronation) but it’s possible that he decided on others in batches (e.g. a couple of palaces, some fortresses, Sandwich and Albemarle, his children, etc). The problem, of course, is that we are very unlikely ever to turn up any source material to enable us to come up with definitive answers, because the naming process essentially took place in Charles’s head. The lack of evidence in Pepys’s papers suggests that he, and later James II & VII, did not consult Pepys, perhaps the one man whom they might have been expected to consult on such matters.

(To be concluded)

 

1665: The First Blast

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

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

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

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

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

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


Captains and Kings

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First, apologies for not posting last week. As I mentioned on Twitter, I paid the price for getting too carried away on ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and typing over 8,000 words in two days with little regard for ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. The result was that I woke up the next morning with a hand resembling a red balloon, and it stayed that way for the best part of a fortnight. Unsurprisingly the doctor diagnosed RSI and advised me to stop typing for a while. (The hand is much improved– thanks to all those who expressed concern!) So this blog is now brought to you via voice recognition software, and I just hope the neighbours don’t get too annoyed as I dictate emails, tweets, blogs and large chunks of books at strange hours of the day and night.

From next week, I’ll be building up to the UK publication of The Blast That Tears the Skies with a series of posts examining the various contexts of the book: the second Anglo-Dutch war, the years 1665, and the battle of Lowestoft (3 June 1665) which forms the climax of the story.

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In my last post, I looked at the ways in which Samuel Pepys was often presented in an exaggerated way as ‘the founder of the modern Royal Navy’/’the saviour of the Navy’/etc. It’s always seemed to me that Pepys’s principal importance was as a creator of systems and an implementer of policy; when it comes to devising policy,  though, we have to remember that late 17th-century England was still overwhelmingly dominated by royal power, and this was especially true of the Navy. Charles II and his brother James, who served as Lord High Admiral from 1660-67, were genuinely and passionately interested in the Navy, and were largely responsible for a number of the initiatives that have often been attributed to Pepys. I wrote about Charles’s role in detail some 20 years ago in a paper published by the Royal Stuart Society. Here are some of the points I made then, which still seem to me to have stood the test of time:

An Admiralty commission came into being [in 1673], but most of the truly important powers of the Admiralty – notably the power to appoint commissioned officers – were reserved to Charles…there was no revolution in naval administration in 1673. It is even possible to take the view that Charles and James simply swapped jobs, with the duke now playing the part of the informal advisor to the lord admiral [the King]. The key change was the appointment of Pepys, who acted far more as a permanent naval secretary to the King than as secretary to the comparatively insignificant Admiralty commission [of 1673-9]. Although this body met regularly, it served largely…as a vehicle for debate, not as an executive council. Discussions sometimes had to be deferred until the King was present, while the absence of the court or meetings of parliament led to long intervals between meetings of the board. As a result, the daily executive direction of naval affairs rested with Charles, who relied heavily on the advice of James and Pepys.  

The main administrative task was the appointment of officers. Pepys presented to the King shortlists which specified the candidates’ experience and recommendations, and Charles then picked the successful candidate. It might be easy for Pepys’s admirers to create a picture of the Admiralty secretary doing all the work and using the King merely as a rubber stamp, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Charles prided himself on his personal knowledge of his sea-officers; indeed, one of the by-products of this, of the King’s interest in the navy, and of the easy informality of the court, was the ease with which naval officers could gain access to him. Thus for Charles, appointing an officer was not a case of sticking pins in shortlists or pulling names out of hats… [Charles also decided on ships’ names, and this was a matter of much greater political significance than one might assume – I’ll return to this issue in a future post.]

The weight of business which fell on the king during this period ensured that, even though he might be able to escape from most other aspects of government when he went to Newmarket, he could not escape from the navy; indeed, for most of the time this seems to have been perhaps the only kind of formal work which he actually did when he went there. In addition to meeting the Admiralty board there on occasions, he regularly signed commissions and warrants there, and his presence ensured that Pepys often had to go to Newmarket himself to carry on the work of the navy…

In addition to being largely responsible for the ‘thirty ships’ programme [of 1677, Charles] initiated several reforms (such as the extension of the principle of ‘half pay’ to officers not on active service) and gave his backing to others, such as the introduction in 1677 of Pepys’s scheme to examine the competence of candidates for lieutenancies. Above all, the King decided on the deployment of warships… [he] personally selected the ships to be employed, sometimes rejecting advice from the Admiralty or Navy Board because of his differing opinion about the relative merits of individual vessels. He took a particular interest in the more unusual and ambitious voyages. When Captain John Narbrough sailed to the South Seas in 1669, he saw the King and Duke of York several times before his departure, and on his return in 1671 the King ordered him to Whitehall on the very day that Narbrough arrived in the Thames, subsequently spending several hours discussing the captain’s voyage with him. In 1677, Narbrough was preparing to go out as admiral to the Mediterranean…between 6 June and 13 July, when he left London for his flagship at Portsmouth, Narbrough met the King alone on three occasions, the Duke of York alone on one, and the royal brothers together once…During the same period, the Admiralty commission met eleven times, chiefly to discuss Narbrough’s instructions for prosecuting the war against Algiers, and Charles attended all but one of these meetings – an attendance record not atypical of the entire period [1673-9].

[Charles continued take an active role in naval affairs even in the year 1679-84, when the powers of the Admiralty were in theory out of his hands and held instead by a commission of opposition parliamentarians – on more than one occasion he even ordered entire squadrons to sea without the Admiralty’s knowledge.]

So what I hope all this demonstrates is that the naval history of the Restoration period wasn’t just ‘the Samuel Pepys show’: it was very much a collaboration between Pepys and the royal brothers, with the latter often playing the principal role because of both their status and their personal enthusiasm for the service. Looking at the naval evidence also gives one a very different picture of King Charles II to that of the lazy, womanising rake that still sometimes appears in romantic fiction and even on children’s TV!