J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Southwold

Solebay 340, Part 3

by

The Battle of Solebay did little to foster greater unity within the combined fleet. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the battle the bitterest recriminations were not those between the British and the French, but those between individual officers in the two fleets. Sir Joseph Jordan and Sir John Kempthorne, Sandwich’s two subordinate flag officers in the blue squadron, were both accused of not supporting their commander. The most damning criticism of Jordan came from Sandwich’s flag captain, Richard Haddock, who accused him of failing to come to the aid of the Royal James. Although Charles and James excused Jordan’s conduct, the ancient admiral had fought his last battle. He retired to Hatfield in Hertfordshire with a royal pension of £500 a year and lived on into his eighties, just long enough to witness the succession of his old commander-in-chief to the British thrones. Meanwhile, d’Estrées launched a vitriolic attack against his own second-in-command, Duquesne. This led to the removal of the Huguenot admiral, an act that was inevitably given an unfavourable religious interpretation by English commentators. Early accounts of the conduct of the French as a whole were mixed. For example, Ralph Verney of Claydon, Buckinghamshire, had been serving on the Prince. When he wrote to his father Edward on 29 May he had time only for a brief account of the few facts he knew, such as the loss of Sandwich and the Royal James; he made no mention of the French at all. By 2 June, he was able to write ’tis certaine the French…behaved themselves gallantly in the fight at sea’, but four days later he wrote ‘the French have lost all that glory, that the first newes brought of their feates at sea. For they were so discreet as to keepe themselves quite out of danger, soe that they lost their men, nor hurt their tackle’ – a charge which was patently untrue, and sounds suspiciously like a case of the younger Verney jumping on a populist bandwagon. Similar rumours swept through the court, the navy and the coffee-houses of London in the early days of June. However, many of these criticisms have to be set in the context of wider political agendas. As Verney pointed out, anyone who censured the French ‘is thought a malignant, and against the court’, and conversely, tales of French misconduct were inevitable at a time when many in the political nation were opposed to the French alliance and the Dutch war. Many had expected the French to betray the British, so in that sense, Solebay provided almost reassuring wish-fulfilment.

In fact, there were few, if any, grounds on which to criticise the conduct of the French squadron at Solebay. The French were the van squadron, and would therefore expect to lead the combined fleet’s line-of-battle to sea – unless they received contradictory orders from the commander-in-chief. Both British and French sources indicate that the only order of any sort which d’Estrées received was a verbal one to keep as close to the wind as he could, an order which did not imply a preference for one tack or the other. If d’Estrées followed the blue and red squadrons to the north he would almost certainly have fallen to leeward of the Dutch; similarly, the direction taken by the British fleet was born of pragmatism, rather than design, because in the flood tide between five and seven on the morning of 28 May, with the wind at east-south-east, the ships would already have had their heads to the north. Why were no clearer orders given? In the first place, the Dutch attack was an almost complete surprise, with the allies having placed too much store on intelligence reports which indicated the Dutch were in their own anchorages; consequently, many accounts of the battle indicate that all parts of the combined fleet, including the French, were in considerable confusion for some time, and many ships cut their anchor cables in their frantic endeavours to gain sea room. Crucially, the confusion seems to have been particularly great aboard the fleet flagship, the Prince, which had begun to careen at two in the morning of the twenty-eighth. When the approach of the Dutch was reported at about three, her master noted ‘[we] cleared shipp in Gods name’, but even so, the ship was only ready for action by seven, half-an-hour before she engaged and some time after she had got under sail. The ship had been heeled over for the careen and her yards had been topped. Therefore, for an indeterminate amount of time after three it is doubtful whether the flagship could have made many signals at all, and there is no evidence that James ever attempted to communicate with individual ships or squadrons; the only signal recorded in all the contemporary accounts is the general one for the fleet to weigh, namely a gun firing and the Prince’s foretopsail being let loose.

It is not even clear whether James was with the ship throughout the night, or whether he had returned hastily to her from quarters ashore; and if so, when. A Southwold restaurant still bears a plaque recording the local tradition that it was the duke’s headquarters ashore prior to the battle (as well as preserving the delicious legend that the doomed Sandwich spent his last night on earth in the building, bedding a local serving wench). Local legend also recalls a panicked recall of men from ashore and suggests that many men were drunk, having been given leave by the duke to celebrate the Whitsun holiday; even if there is only a grain of truth in these stories, the fleet’s response to de Ruyter’s attack was clearly disorganised and hastily improvised. At about six, d’Estrées sent one of his officers, Hérouard, to request specific orders, but received in reply only the verbal command to keep close to the wind. Sir Julian Corbett’s remark that ‘it apparently never entered the duke’s head to tell [the French] the rear was to lead’ makes perfect sense if it is set in the context of a flagship aboard which confusion reigned and to which the admiral might have returned only recently, without time to assess the situation fully. Moreover, James had a habit of giving peremptory and ambiguous commands, then expecting his subordinates to second-guess his meaning. It is therefore entirely possible that the Duke of York simply forgot to give, or did not properly explain, a simple but essential part of an order whose verbal nature again suggests an element of haste. Significantly, James never seems to have suggested, even in private, that the French had disobeyed his orders.

Nevertheless, perception was all, and the popular perception was undoubtedly that the French had been duplicitous. This impression was reinforced during the course of the war – by Louis XIV’s triumphalist campaign in the Netherlands and above all by the naval battle of the Texel / Kijkduin on 11 August 1673, when the French fleet again separated from the two British squadrons but this time failed to engage in a meaningful way and allegedly disobeyed a recall command, again allegedly because it was under secret orders from Louis to permit the British and the Dutch to hammer each other. The growing opposition to the war was reflected in Parliament and ultimately forced Charles II to make a unilateral peace with the Dutch early in 1674, but more importantly it can be argued (and has been, by the likes of Steve Pincus and myself) that Solebay, the Texel and the war as a whole were critical in developing a popular mindset which regarded the French, rather than the Dutch, as the natural national enemy.

Solebay 340, Part 2

by

Despite their impressive outward appearance, the French ships simply had no experience of operating in such a large fleet in wartime. Even before d’Estrées arrived at Spithead, King Charles II himself, at a meeting of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, expressed the view that the Duke of York should ‘ripen the Fr[ench] in passage and rules of sailing and fighting etc before they fall in with the Dutch’, adding that it would be better if the French were not committed to battle too soon. After the juncture of the fleets, the French were regularly found guilty of manoeuvring and sailing errors by experienced British officers, whose comments ranged from the sympathetic to the caustic.  Only time could have righted these problems, and the Dutch were well aware of this; after all, they had their own experience of undertaking combined operations with the French during 1666-7. Moreover, the Dutch urgently needed to upset the seemingly inexorable progress of the Anglo-French ‘grand design’ and its war machine. By the end of May 1672, the United Provinces were in dire straits. Maaseik had fallen, Orsoy, Rheinberg and Burick were all under attack, and the main French armies under Marshal Turenne and Louis XIV himself were at Cleves, on course to accomplish the hugely symbolic (and, for the Dutch, strategically disastrous) feat of crossing the Rhine on 2 June. Meanwhile, the allied armies of Cologne and Munster were pouring across the eastern border into Overijssel and laying siege to Groningen. In the midst of this desperate crisis, Michiel De Ruyter took his fleet to sea. With him went Cornelis De Witt, political representative of his brother Johan and the States-General, who sat calmly in a velvet-covered armchair on the quarterdeck of the flagship De Zeven Provincien as battle raged around him.

 The Fleets at Solebay Ships Guns
Allies 82 (French = 30) 4942
Dutch 75 4208

De Ruyter had already made an abortive attempt to engage before the juncture of the two allied fleets, and when he learned on 27 May that the combined fleet was moored in Sole Bay to take on provisions (it had arrived there on the twenty-third), he immediately ordered his fleet to attack, taking the allies by surprise in the early hours of the twenty-eighth. At three that morning, the master of the victualling ship Friendship saw an incoming scout raise the alarm by letting her topgallant sails fly loose and firing her guns. The combined fleet was moored parallel to the shore in its squadrons and divisions: the French squadron, forming the van, was the most southerly and westerly, with Duquesne’s division the southernmost of all, while the earl of Sandwich’s blue squadron lay to the north and east of James’s red squadron. The wind was from the east-south-east, the Dutch approaching from the north-east. What happened next was to be the most controversial aspect of the battle, and the cause of both contemporary and later criticism of the conduct of the French. While both the blue and red squadrons got underway to the north on the starboard tack, thereby reversing the order of the fleet, d’Estrées got underway to the south on the port tack. The spectacle of the French fleet going in the opposite direction to its British allies was the origin of the charge that the French had deliberately deserted the rest of the combined fleet. In fact, the French put up a good fight against Adrian Banckert’s Zeeland squadron, which was detached to engage them: up to 450 French mariners were killed, among them des Rabesnières, one of the architects of the naval alliance, who was subsequently honoured with a spectacular funeral in the choir of  Rochester Cathedral. This heavily publicised and deeply symbolic act was as much a tribute to the dead officer’s Protestant faith as to his gallantry, and perhaps was also intended to reconcile those who saw it or read about it in their newsletters or Gazettes to what was already an unpopular alliance with a Catholic power.

While the French fought and died to the south, the British fleet was hotly engaged to the north. The light winds ensured that the whole scene was soon shrouded in smoke, adding to the confusion and making it difficult to identify misconduct. The flagship Prince was under sail by 5.30 (no small achievement, as she had been heeled over to careen only two hours before) and by eight was engaged with the Dutch. De Ruyter personally targeted the Prince; although she was easily identifiable to the trained eye, the huge royal standard at her main made her unmistakable. De Ruyter now delivered one of the laconic bon mots for which he was famous. Turning to his helmsman, he said ‘Mate Zeger, that’s our man’. Zeger replied ‘Sir, that’s what shall happen’. The Prince was soon under fire from seven ships and could obtain no relief from her seconds, which were becalmed. The Duke of York ignored the risks to the life of the heir to the throne, striding across the deck to encourage the men and ordering the helmsman to edge ever closer to the enemy. Several of his retinue were cut down on either side of him, but the duke bore a charmed life. The new acting captain of the Prince, John Narbrough, was impressed: ‘no prince upon the whole earth can compare with his Royal Highness in gallant resolution in fighting his enemy…he is general, soldier, pilot, master, seaman; to say all, he is everything that man can be, and most pleasant when the great shot are thundering about his ears’. By midday the Prince was effectively disabled, her main topmast shot away and her mainsail rendered useless by the fallen mast. With Dutch fireships bearing down for the kill, Narbrough ordered the ship’s boats to tow her to safety, and James shifted his flag to the St Michael; when that ship in turn became shattered, he moved to the London. Other ships were in almost as bad a state. The Resolution had seven feet of water in the hold and had to drop of the line. The Royal Katherine was taken by the Dutch, then retaken shortly afterwards when some of her gunners managed to overpower the Dutch prize crew; even so her captain Sir John Chicheley, who was also the squadron’s rear-admiral, had already been taken off and was on his way to captivity in Holland. The Red squadron fought on until about eight in the evening, when the two fleets finally parted.

The main force of the Dutch attack had been directed against the squadron nearest to them, the Blue, and especially against Sandwich’s flagship, the brand new 100-gun First Rate Royal James. The Blue had little time to organise itself into a line of battle, and the Royal James was soon isolated. Immobilised by Jan Van Brakel’s Groot Hollandia, which became entangled in her bow cables and rigging, Sandwich’s ship was subjected to a devastating bombardment by Van Ghent’s flagship Dolfijn. An order for Jordan and his division to come up to her assistance was deliberately ignored; at least, that was the interpretation placed on events by Richard Haddock, Sandwich’s flag captain, who recorded how Jordan ‘passed by us to windward very unkindly…and took no notice at all of us’. Jordan’s own account of the action effectively ignored the issue, concentrating instead on how his Sovereign and the rest of his division had fought all day (or so he claimed) against eight or nine large Dutch ships. Meanwhile Charles Wylde, captain of the Bristol in the Red squadron, had tacked at noon and fought to the south-eastward for two hours, ‘having a hot and bloody fight without any cessation, and so kept on, they having the wind to our great disadvantage’. At about two, the Bristol passed to leeward of the Royal James and saw the great ship on fire. She had been attacked by three fireships, one of which, the Vrede under Captain Jan Daniëlszoon van den Rijn, had been secured to her port quarter and successfully ignited. With many of her men already dead or wounded (including her flag captain, Haddock, who had been shot in the foot) the Royal James no longer had the resources to fight off the attack or to put out the flames. By four, when the hastily repaired Prince came up, the Royal James was burned out. The fate of Sandwich was a mystery until his bloated body, recognisable only by the Garter ribbon that he still wore, was fished out of the sea on 10 June, thirty miles from the grave of the Royal James. Wylde of the Bristol, who clearly wrote up his ship’s log contemporaneously, prayed ‘the Lord grant his Royal Highness his life and our fleet better success…God in mercy continue our general and all our courages, and hope to ring them [the Dutch] a better peal than ever they heard, this being not inferior to any [battle] before’.

Wylde was entirely justified in praying for the Duke of York’s safety, for the hammering of the flagships inevitably led to a shocking attrition rate. In addition to Sandwich, the recently knighted Sir John Cox, the Duke of York’s flag captain on the Prince, was killed by a cannonball, while Sandwich’s opposite number, Van Ghent (who was killed by canister shot that shattered his torso and left leg) became the only senior Dutch officer who fell; he is commemorated by a large memorial in the Domkerk at Utrecht. As well as Cox and the Frenchmen Les Rabesnieres and Des Ardents,  five English captains were killed, the most notable being Francis Digby, son of the Earl of Bristol and one of the chief architects of the combined fleet, and Sir Frescheville Holles, the charismatic and swashbuckling one-armed cavalier who had clashed more than once with the rather more prim Samuel Pepys. One of the lieutenants who fell was the twenty-one-year-old Winston Churchill of the Fairfax; his elder brother John, who was attending the Duke of York aboard the Prince, survived the battle, and went on to command in many more glorious and successful engagements. Charles Harbord, son of the king’s Surveyor-General, and Charles Cottrell, son of his Master of Ceremonies, perished with Sandwich on the Royal James; last Thursday I was at a superb concert in Westminster Abbey, and from my seat in the nave I could see the grand memorial erected to the memory of the two young friends by Harbord’s father. Also among the dead was Colonel Richard Nicholls, another member of the Duke of York’s retinue, who had once played a not insignificant part in rewriting world history. In 1664 Nicholls had commanded the expedition that overran the small Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of a long and densely forested island off the American coast, and renamed it New York in honour of his patron. Nicholls’ body was taken back to his home town of Ampthill in Bedfordshire and interred beneath a monument capped by the Dutch cannonball that had killed him.

On the lower deck, men perished in their hundreds. Sandwich’s lieutenant, held as a prisoner on De Zeven Provincien, was appalled by the casualties at Solebay, telling De Ruyter that more had died by the afternoon than in all four days of the great battle of 1-4 June 1666. Over a thousand British sailors were killed (and almost half as many again died in the French squadron), including perhaps half of the crew of the Royal James; a contemporary Dutch list suggests that some 528 of their sailors perished. As usual in seventeenth century warfare, the flagships bore the brunt. The losses on the Royal James were exceptional and amply demonstrated the devastating consequences of a successful fireship attack (which were mercifully rare), but the other British flagship, the Prince, had about a hundred killed and wounded; however, the French Ruby, the last ship in the rear-admiral of the Blue’s division, had only three killed and four wounded. Similarly De Ruyter’s flagship Zeven Provincien had twenty-eight killed, a figure exceeded by only one ship in the Dutch fleet. Each bare statistic conceals individual tragedies. The deaths of just four ordinary seamen on the Victory left no fewer than twenty-one children fatherless in Midland villages far from the sea. William Williamson, boatswain of the St George, died of wounds received in the battle, leaving a widow and six children at Rochester. Soldiers fell alongside mariners. Thomas King of Charlton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, died aboard the Advice, Edward Bevan of Pembridge, Herefordshire, aboard the Royal James. Inevitably, some sought to exploit the relatively generous provision of royal rewards for the families of dead and wounded men: Daniel Vincent, ordinary seaman aboard the Victory at Solebay, who claimed that he had a wife and six children, was actually an unmarried man. Even officers jumped on the bandwagon. John Tooley, lieutenant of the Third Rate Edgar (who claimed to have six children when he actually had only two), the commander of a sloop and the captain of an infantry company were all on a list of 117 names that an Admiralty clerk triumphantly titled ‘The Cheates Discovered’.

On the day after the battle, 29 May, James summoned a council of his flag officers and decided to renew the engagement. After all, the date was auspicious: it was both the birthday of his brother the king and the anniversary of the Stuart Restoration, so the imperatives to re-engage and to win were particularly strong. The ‘bloody flag’ of defiance – the red flag at the main, the signal to engage – was hoisted, accompanied by ‘three shouts for joy, to see it flying and we so near the enemy’. According to Charles Wylde of the Bristol, James intended ‘by the assistance of the Almighty to have rung them [the Dutch] such a peal and played them such a game that they might have had occasion to have remembered all the Whitsuntides hereafter’. The planned attack was thwarted by the onset of both ‘a dark and thick fog’ and a gale so strong that it was impossible to run out the lower tier of guns on the flagship; night was also drawing on, and although the Dutch fleet was only half a mile away, the pursuit was abandoned. The strange weather of the twenty-ninth was the precursor of a particularly shocking summer, even by the standards of the ‘Little Ice Age’.  By the beginning of August, one of the Scots serving in the fleet (and who thus presumably had long personal experience of dire weather) could write to his country’s Lord Admiral, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, that ‘we have had a very tedious summer of it, never fleet having endured so much foul weather’. A week later, another of the duke’s correspondents reported to him that ‘the Dutch had traffic with their confederate the Old Gentleman (= Satan) in this affair, for nothing ever came so opportunely as these late storms for them’, while a third claimed that there had not been ‘three fair days together this ten weeks’. These comments are borne out by the objective evidence of the weather entries in ships’ logs and reports from both the fleet and coastal towns, all of which tell a sorry tale of violent storms alternating with dense fogs; as John Narbrough, the duke of York’s flag captain, put it on 27 July, ‘never such weather known in these seas at this time of year before now’. The damage to the fleet was so great that it withdrew to effect repairs, first at Bridlington Bay – where it spent much of August – and then to the Buoy of the Nore, where it arrived on the twenty-third, effectively ending the year’s campaign.

(To be concluded)

Solebay 340, Part 1

by

Today, 28 May, marks the 340th anniversary of the battle of Solebay in 1672. (It is also the anniversary of the first Battle of Schooneveld in the following year.) This was the first naval battle of the third Anglo-Dutch war, and the dramas of the battle itself were matched by its far-reaching consequences. So I thought I’d mark it by publishing my take on the battle and the naval campaign of 1672. Some of this material was originally part of a paper I gave at a conference at Exeter University in the 1990s; it was never published and was then reworked to become a chapter of an academic book I planned to write about the third war, but which was rather overtaken by events (particularly the switch in my focus to writing fiction, which meant I had no time or particularly pressing need to write more academic books). For convenience, I’ve split it into three parts which will go online in short order. I’ve also excised the footnotes, but can provide the authority for individual statements if asked!

***

A combined Anglo-French fleet was a key element of the secret Treaty of Dover, signed between Charles II and Louis XIV on 1 June 1670, which set out their plan for a joint attack on the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The marquis de Seignelay, son of France’s principal minister, Colbert, went to England in November 1671 to complete the detailed arrangements for its organisation . Seignelay joined with two other French negotiators, the Huguenot officer des Rabesnières-Treillebois (who would perish as rear-admiral of the French fleet at the battle of Solebay) and the French ambassador in London, Colbert de Croissy, and their discussions with Charles II’s ministry culminated in January 1672 in the so-called ‘secret treaty of Whitehall’. This was signed inter alia by the Earl of Sandwich, holder of the high honorific position of vice-admiral of England, despite his serious misgivings about the principles underpinning the war. ‘Fine tuning’ of the agreement was subsequently undertaken by Captain Francis Digby, an experienced naval officer, second son of the Earl of Bristol and one of the principal models for my fictional hero Matthew Quinton, who spent March and April 1672 in France. He met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and had several meetings with Colbert over the next few days, working alongside Charles II’s ambassador to France, ‘the almost indecently ambitious’ Ralph Montagu. 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, having ‘the same liberty of visiting the ports and ships as was allowed to Mr de Seignelay in England’, before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry – dying in battle, like his French counterpart des Rabesnières, at Solebay on 28 May.

The terms as eventually agreed in the Seignelay and Digby missions went some way toward eliminating the most obvious potential causes of discord. After some argument between Digby and Montagu on the one hand and Colbert on the other, the British crown’s claim to the ‘salute to the flag’, which had caused so many problems in diplomatic relations with France during the 1660s, was suspended for the duration of the war; in practice, when the two fleets finally joined on 7 May 1672 some of the French ships did salute the British flagship while others did not. As the secret treaty of Dover had specified, the overall command of the combined fleet was given to James, duke of York and Albany, Lord High Admiral of England, who had commanded the British fleet at the battle of Lowestoft in 1665. In terms of both experience and social rank, the king’s brother was the obvious commander-in-chief, and his appointment avoided some rather awkward political problems – the French had expressed an unwillingness to serve under the other two likely candidates, Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Sandwich, both of whom opposed the war and one of whom (Rupert) was known to be almost virulently anti-French. Appointing James ensured that the comte d’Estrées, vice-admiral of France, could be appointed second-in-command with no loss of national prestige, especially as James was given a French as well as a British commission, but d’Estrées’ almost complete lack of seagoing experience necessitated a clumsy compromise by which Sandwich, who was to command the rear squadron, was to leapfrog to the supreme command if James was incapacitated or absent. In practice, this principle of always having a British officer in overall command applied only to the main fleet; on other occasions, even vastly more experienced British captains, like Sir Richard Haddock (bringing a squadron from Portsmouth to the fleet in May 1673), were placed under the orders of the French, and it was accepted from the beginning that if a substantial British squadron was to be sent to the Mediterranean at any point during the war, it was to be under French command.

The flag officers and captains appointed to command the combined fleet for the 1672 campaign were probably as distinguished and experienced a body of naval officers as the British and French kingdoms could muster. In the Duke of York’s own squadron, the Red, the vice-admiral’s flag was given to Sir George Ayscue, one of the few well-born officers to have held high command under the Commonwealth (he was a godson of George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his knighthood had come from King Charles I). Ayscue had also commanded a Swedish fleet, and had recovered from the disgrace of being the only British admiral ever to surrender in action, a ‘distinction’ that he still holds; his flagship, the Prince, ran aground and was surrounded during the Four Days’ Battle (1666), and Ayscue was held prisoner at Louvestein Castle in the Netherlands for over a year. The rear-admiral of the Red, Sir Joseph Jordan, was a seventy year old veteran and sometime staunch parliamentarian. Sandwich was appointed Admiral of the Blue with the Irish cavalier Sir Edward Spragge as his vice-admiral and Sir John Harman, another former parliamentarian, as rear-admiral. The careful selection of this command group was undermined by the death of Ayscue on 5 April. Ten changes of ship or flag resulted: Spragge and Harman moved to the Red to serve under James, flying their flags in the London and Charles respectively. Jordan moved to the Blue as vice-admiral, taking as his flagship the huge and venerable Sovereign, and the vacancy as rear-admiral of the Blue was filled by Sir John Kempthorne, a former cavalier who had distinguished himself in a dramatic single-ship battle against a Barbary corsair squadron in 1669 and who now hoisted his flag in the ancient Second Rate St Andrew. These appointments exacerbated an already tense atmosphere in the officer corps, which was riven by factions based partly on the old political lines of ‘cavaliers and roundheads’ and partly on newer, more personal animosities. Sandwich’s return to high command alienated many: he had been disgraced following a unilateral distribution of the cargoes of lucrative prizes captured by his fleet in 1665, and he knew full well that ‘I must do I know not what, to save my reputation’, as he told his friend John Evelyn. Sir Robert Holmes, the chief naval client of Prince Rupert (who was given shore responsibilities as de facto acting Lord High Admiral), was overlooked for the vacancy caused by Ayscue’s death, and this merely fuelled his resentment against his old friend Spragge, who had moved from Rupert’s to York’s orbit and had benefited accordingly. Several of the more junior captains nursed their own grievances and ambitions for promotion. Thus the officers entrusted with the task of destroying the Dutch state were very far from being a ‘band of brothers’, even before they were joined by a new, unknown and automatically suspect set of comrades-in-arms, the French.

The command of the French squadron was held by Jean, Comte d’Estrées, son of a Marshal of France and nephew of one of King Henri IV’s legion of mistresses. Originally an army officer who had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general in the 1650s, d’Estrées transferred to the sea service in the 1668 and by 1672 was the senior French commander in the Atlantic. An arrogant and abrasive character whose relations with his subordinates were often difficult, d’Estreés hoisted his flag in the Saint Philippe, a relatively old seventy-eight gun ship. D’Estrees’ second-in-command was the sixty-two year old Abraham Duquesne, flying his flag in the new Second Rate Terrible and commanding the van division of ten ships.  A Huguenot from Rouen, Duquesne had risen to the very top of the French officer corps despite the impediments of his religion and low birth (he had begun his career in merchant ships). The two remaining French flag officers were Des Ardents, ‘un excellent et vaillant officier’, commanding the Tonnant and acting as d’Estrées’ second-in-command in his centre division of eleven ships. La Rabesnieres-Treillebois, another Huguenot and one of the architects of the naval alliance, commanded the rear division of nine ships, flying his flag in the Superbe. Six of the French captains were singled out by Seignelay as ‘les bons ouvrirs’; their number included the future admiral the comte de Tourville, then thirty years old and captain of the fifty-gun Sage. Although the commanders of the French squadron were undoubtedly as strong a group as Louis XIV could have provided, the same certainly was not true of the ships they commanded. The largest ship was the Saint Philippe, which carried fewer guns than eleven ships in the two British squadrons; none of the huge new First Rates built at Brest and Toulon in the late 1660s were allocated to d’Estrées. However, this may have been due to concerns about the sailing qualities of the new ships, a consequence of the difficulty of providing the huge crews that would be required to man them, or else simply a realistic reflection of the opposition that they were expected to face. The largest ship in the Dutch fleet employed in the summer of 1672 carried only eighty-two guns, and the smaller French ships were certainly more akin to the majority of Dutch ships than the generally overgunned and frequently sluggish British vessels, which carried their guns much lower in the hull than their lighter, faster and often more manoeuvrable French counterparts.

Attempts to achieve genuine co-operation between the British and French squadrons were made in many ways, both large and small. Tactical arrangements were clearly going to be crucial to the hoped-for success against the Dutch navy, and one obvious requirement of tactical co-operation was met from the beginning: French translations of all the relevant sailing and fighting instructions were provided to d’Estrées’ ships. In these areas, the French were clearly expected to conform to British practice, and this is most strikingly the case in the area which was probably to cause some contention between the two nations than almost any other, both during and after the war – the signalling system. The French fleet was incorporated into the system of flag signals which the British had used since at least the time of the second Anglo-Dutch war. This entailed giving each ship in a division a number between one and fourteen, although the variable size of divisions meant that not all numbers were allocated; a specific signal corresponding to each number indicated that the admiral wished to speak to that particular vessel. Therefore, Le Téméraire, the second ship in the French rear-admiral’s division in August 1672, was allocated flag number six, so that her divisional signal consisted of a white flag with a pendant flying from the foretopmast downwards on the backstays, while her individual signal flew from the foretopsail yard.

There was considerable interest and curiosity on both sides in the qualities of each other’s ships. At the first juncture of the two fleets in May 1672, British observers were particularly impressed with des Rabesnières’ ship Le Superbe, which was visited (along with several other French vessels) by both Charles II and the duke of York, and which Samuel Pepys claimed became the model for most of the new British third-rates built in the mid- and late 1670s; the French ships in general were felt to be well-designed and lacking in superfluous clutter, although there were mixed reports of their manning levels and some criticism of their guns, which were thought to be lighter than and inferior to their British equivalents.

(To be continued)