Pepys's Navy: Ships, Men & Warfare, 1649–1689

Key Dates

Dates throughout the book are given in Old Style, which was 10 days behind the calendar used on the continent (thus the Dutch date the battle of Lowestoft to 13 June 1665, not 3 June). The year is taken as beginning on 1 January, not 25 March as was technically the case at the time.

Part One

THE NAVY IN PEACE, WAR, AND REVOLUTIONS

CHAPTER 1

The End of the First ‘Royal Navy’, c. 1588–1649

ON 30 JANUARY 1649 KING CHARLES I was executed outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace. For the first time in many centuries, England was without a monarch, and within months, a fully republican form of government, the Common-wealth, was in place. Exactly forty years later, on 30 January 1689, the guns of British warships fired a twenty-gun salute and dipped their flags to mark the anniversary of the ‘royal martyrdom’.¹ The salute must have had a surreal quality of déjà vu, especially for the oldest witnesses to it, for on that day, and yet again, the three kingdoms in the British Isles had no king: Charles I’s younger son, James II of England and VII of Scotland, had fled his kingdoms in the previous December, and it would be another fortnight before the vacant throne was officially filled. On 30 January 1689, too, the navy was preparing for war. The formal declaration against France did not come until May, but hostilities commenced unofficially much earlier. From that time until the surrender of Napoleon Bonaparte on the deck of hms Bellerophon, 126 years later, war against France came to be perceived by many in the navy, at least, as the natural or desirable order of things; and for much of the time, it usually was. It was the navy of Anson, Rodney, Howe and ultimately Horatio Nelson, culminating in the period from about 1756 to 1815 that has been immortalised by historians, novelists and film-makers alike as the‘classic age’ of British naval history.

Samuel Pepys as secretary to the Admiralty.

(MEZZOTINT BY R WHITE AFTER THE PORTRAIT BY SIR G KNELLER)

This perception has led, consciously or unconsciously, to comparative neglect of the preceding period; what might be called the navy’s ‘long seventeenth century’, from about 1600 to about 1750.² The naval campaigns of that time tend to be less well known than those that went before or came after, and the key figures in the development of the Royal Navy tend to be less familiar to general readers – with one notable exception, who actually serves to prove, rather than disprove, the point. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) is one of the best-loved figures in cultural history, thanks largely to his remarkably frank and moving shorthand diary of the period 1660–9. A mine of information and gossip on music, literature, the theatre, court scandal, the Plague, the Great Fire of London and his own tangled love life, Pepys tends to be known first and foremost as a brilliant social commentator and a flawed but deeply attractive human being. But professionally, Samuel Pepys was a naval administrator, nothing else. Methodical, inquisitive and highly competent, he was also a formidably opinionated self-publicist who made enemies just as easily as he made friends. For almost thirty years, ten of them (1673–9, 1684–9) in the pivotal role of secretary to the Admiralty, Pepys was at the heart of one of the most important periods of transition in British naval history.³ In terms of the evolution of fighting tactics, professional development, administrative structures and procedures, and – much less tangibly – the navy’s perception of itself, the period 1649–89 was debatably the critical stage in its transformation into the fighting force that went on to build up an unprecedented record of victory during its ‘classic age’.

FROM ARMADA TO CIVIL WAR

The victory over the Spanish Armada (1588) was gained by a navy that was still ‘medieval’ in many essentials. Only thirty-four of the 197 English ships were owned by the crown; the rest were supplied as private ventures by wealthy individuals or seaports. Although the best galleons were large, new and technically advanced, many of the other ships that put to sea on behalf of Elizabeth I were small, and of little use in battle against Spain’s floating arsenals. English tactics had moved away from the continental reliance on boarding, instead placing the emphasis on gunnery from longer range, but many soldiers still served on the fleet. The admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, was an aristocrat appointed to the command by virtue of his social and political status alone, although the same was also true of his Spanish counterpart, the Duke of Medina Sidonia.⁴ The victory over the great Spanish invasion fleet was largely fortuitous, owing more to the weather than any tactical acumen or innate superiority on the part of Howard, his men and his ships, but it helped to create the myth of the English navy as the foremost bulwark of national defence. The Armada was only one campaign in twenty years of naval warfare from 1585 onwards, a collective experience that shaped the consciousness of Englishmen (Samuel Pepys included) for generations to come.⁵ Moreover, the longevity of several prominent naval men from the ‘Armada era’ ensured that the potent mystique surrounding the service of that time was handed down to succeeding generations. The last surviving captain who had commanded a ship against the Spanish Armada, Edmund Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, died as late as 1646, while a number of men who had commanded at sea under Drake or his contemporaries, the likes of Sir Henry Mainwaring and Sir Robert Mansell, lived on until the 1650s. The last Spanish prize from the Armada year, the Eagle Hulk, was ‘laid ashore for age at the north end of Chatham dock, 1675, and sold December 1683.⁶ Two heavily rebuilt veterans of the Armada fight, the Vanguard and Rainbow, survived into the Restoration era, the latter lasting until 1680; although the evidence is extremely dubious, the Lion, which survived until 1698, may have been first built in 1557, when England was still Catholic and still possessed Calais. Other Elizabethan warship names were regularly revived to inspire succeeding generations: Victory (1620), Triumph (1623), Tiger (1647), Dreadnought and Revenge (1660), Warspite (1666), Vanguard again (1678).⁷

The defeat of the Spanish Armada.

(© THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

These abiding memories of the supposed ‘golden age’ of the Armada fight created a burden of popular expectation on those who served between 1649 and 1689. For instance, the supposedly ‘Elizabethan’ idea of a self-financing naval war, in which fleets seized control of their enemies’ economic lifelines – in other words, the state-sponsored piracy in which the likes of Drake had indulged – underpinned, at least in part, Oliver Cromwell’s desire to capture the Spanish bullion fleet in the 1650s, and Charles II’s wish to strangle Dutch trade in the 1660s and 1670s.* In reality, though, the ‘golden age’ was far less golden than nostalgia made it out to be, and the idea of the self-financing naval war was always a chimera. Successive campaigns in European waters and the Caribbean from 1589 to 1604 brought relatively little success; some, like the Earl of Essex’s attack on Cadiz in 1596 and Sir Francis Drake’s final voyage in the same year, were ignominious reverses. Only further gusts of‘Protestant wind’ dispersed two more Spanish Armadas, but even such favourable elements could not prevent a damaging Spanish landing in Ireland in 1601.⁸ The material condition of the navy also suffered, with crews going unpaid for long periods. Queen Elizabeth I, who had presided over it all, finally died in 1603, and England’s new monarch, King James VI of Scotland, wanted to establish a reputation as rexpacificus, a European peacemaker. He also had little real understanding of, or interest in, the navy that he had inherited; his cousin the Earl of Bothwell, hereditary Lord High Admiral of Scotland, was disparaging about James’s feeble credentials as an admiral.⁹

James quickly ended the nineteen-year-long war with Spain. Thereafter, and for the duration of his reign, the navy became even more neglected. Some new warships were built, such as the large Prince Royal of 1610, and a few expeditions were undertaken, such as the despatch in 1620 of a fleet under Sir Robert Mansell against the corsairs of Algiers, but on the whole, James’s navy and its Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham (the former Lord Howard of Effingham), were widely suspected of rampant corruption and inefficiency.¹⁰ Two major commissions of enquiry, in 1608 and 1618, and a new Lord High Admiral from 1619 onwards – James’s favourite, the future Duke of Buckingham – brought in some reforms, but the overall condition of the fleet remained poor. During his Algiers expedition, Mansell constantly bemoaned the weak and foul condition of his ships, the stinking beer, the ‘piecemeal and torn’ victuals and the constant back-biting and penny-pinching that he knew would be rampant at home.¹¹ These problems re-emerged in the years 1625–9, when Buckingham and the new king, Charles I, embarked on the only large-scale naval wars that England would fight in the halfcentury between 1604 and 1652. Expeditions to the Caribbean, against Cadiz and to relieve the French Protestants at La Rochelle were poorly organised and ineptly commanded, and uniformly failed to achieve their objectives, comprehensively blasting England’s inherited reputation for naval competence and turning the country into the object of bad foreign jokes.¹² In 1629 Charles abandoned both the wars and the institution of Parliament, which had proved increasingly fractious. Inevitably, funding of the navy suffered at first, but in the mid-1630s Charles and his Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Portland, extended the old medieval system of Ship Money (by which coastal towns paid for maritime defence) to the whole of the country. Despite some opposition, collection rates were far more impressive than they had been for parliamentary taxation, raising some £800,000 between 1634 and 1638, and Charles could finally embark on a sustained programme of naval reconstruction.

The Lion, allegedly a rebuilding of a ship first built in 1557; she was finally sold out of the service in 1698.

(RICHARD ENDSOR, BASED ON VARIOUS DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS BY THEVANDEVELDES)

The centrepiece of the ‘Ship Money fleets’ was the vast Sovereign of the Seas of 100 guns, built at Woolwich in 1637 by Phineas Pett. She would be the centrepiece of many subsequent fleets, too, despite her cumbersome sailing qualities; she fought in all three Anglo-Dutch wars and, much later, against the French. All too clearly, though, the Sovereign was wholly inappropriate for the purpose that allegedly underpinned the levying of Ship Money, namely defence against the small, agile raiding craft used by Dunkirkers and the North African corsairs. In fact, her name is the best clue for the purpose that Charles really had in mind for her. It reflected the king’s legal claim to sovereignty over all of the ‘British seas’, which supposedly extended along most of Europe’s western seaboard. The claim originated in a distinctly dubious reading of the naval history of the Anglo-Saxon period, especially the reigns of Kings Alfred and Edgar and, thanks to the Stuart accession in England, of the migration into English law of the Scots concept of‘territorial waters’.¹³ The claim was given expression in print by John Selden in his Mare Clausum of 1635, written while the Sovereign was under construction. It manifested itself at sea in the ‘salute to the flag’, a supposed right due to English warships and forts from foreign vessels; the salute became one of the most significant catalysts of the later Anglo-Dutch wars.¹⁴ Moreover, the king’s ostentatious parading of his ‘Ship Money fleet’ in the Channel every summer from 1635 to 1638 was an obvious but misplaced attempt to impress and intimidate other European states, who were then preoccupied with devastating each other’s territory in the series of vicious and interconnected conflicts known as the Thirty Years War. Not for the last time, the cruises of the ‘Ship Money fleets’ demonstrated conclusively that navies alone can exert precisely no influence on the course of events in central Europe, although it undoubtedly had a certain deterrent value and, even less tangibly, helped to restore the nation’s tattered naval reputation.¹⁵

In the end, his substantial investment in the navy did King Charles I little good. When his high-handed religious policy led to war with his homeland of Scotland in 1639–40, ambitious amphibious operations against the Forth and Tay were poorly co-ordinated with land campaigns, and came to nothing.¹⁶ Forced to recall his English Parliament in 1640 to fund his Scottish wars, Charles encountered an outpouring of resentment against a whole raft of his policies, of which the levying of Ship Money was one; it was abolished by statute in 1641. Finally, when the conflict with Parliament deteriorated towards open civil war during the summer of 1642, the navy to which Charles had devoted so much care (and money) deserted him. Disillusioned by bad pay, won over by clever Parliamentarian propaganda, and resentful of an inept royal attempt to change their high command, the officers and men of the navy declared almost unanimously for Parliament.¹⁷

The notional extent of the ‘British Seas’, from Stadland in Norway to Cape Finisterre.

(FROM JOHN SELDEN’S MARE CLAUSUM, 1635)

The navy’s decision to align with Parliament instead of the king had important consequences for the outcome of the civil war, though the navy’s role was largely unsung and tends to be overlooked. The navy’s allegiance to Parliament deterred any potential intervention by European powers on behalf of the king, and although those powers were largely preoccupied with their own wars, France, Spain and the Netherlands either contemplated such intervention or were invited to do so by Charles. Its command of the seas also enabled Parliament to supply beleaguered garrisons, such as Plymouth, Hull and Lyme Regis, to intercept Royalist privateers operating from the West Country, Ireland and the Channel Islands, and to mount amphibious operations, such as those carried out in Milford Haven in 1643–4. But there were failures, too – notably the failures to intercept both the arms convoy that Queen Henrietta Maria brought in person into Bridlington Bay in February 1643 and the Royalist army that was ferried across from Ireland later in the same year. The Royalists were also able to build their own miniature navy and mercantile marine, centred on Ireland and western ports such as Bristol, Exeter and Dartmouth.¹⁸ Although Parliament neglected the navy because of the more pressing demands (and political importance) of its army, it did pay more attention to merchant interests than had Charles I’s regime, whose perceived neglect of trade had lost him much support in London in particular. A proper convoy system was instituted by 1650, and merchants were strongly represented both in the restructured naval administration that was created shortly afterwards and in commands in the navy itself, which was forced to draw on politically sound merchant captains to replace the Royalist officers purged from 1642 onwards.

1648 also saw a major crisis in naval affairs. Like the army, the navy had suffered steadily mounting arrears of pay following the end of the first civil war in 1646, but the navy lacked the army’s political clout and its ability physically to occupy the City of London to press its demands on Parliament. Discontent over growing political and religious radicalism also motivated many in the fleet. A serious riot in Canterbury in December 1647 protested against Parliament’s recent decision to abolish Christmas, felt to be a papist and pagan festival, and in the spring the anger spread west to the dockyard towns along the Medway and east to the coast. The consequence was a large-scale naval revolt, beginning in the Downs on 27 May 1648. Ultimately, nine warships sailed to the Netherlands and offered their services to Charles, Prince of Wales, who delegated their command to his cousin, the former cavalry general Prince Rupert of the Rhine (1619–82); Rupert would later become one of the prominent admirals of the Restoration period, and was an underrated but effective First Lord of the Admiralty from 1673 to 1679. Although the Royalists found it impossible to retain (or rather, to pay for) the loyalty of their new fleet, they still had ten ships at sea when Charles I was executed, and his son became King Charles II, if only in name.¹⁹ The younger Charles was at The Hague when he received the news of his father’s death; eleven years later, he was there again when he received the news that he had been restored to his father’s throne. The paths of the Stuarts and the Netherlands were to have a habit of crossing.

The Sovereign of the Seas (1637); the elaborate beakhead was removed in 1651.

(CONTEMPORARY ENGRAVING BY J PAYNE)

THE ‘NATURAL ENEMY’? RELATIONS WITH THE DUTCH TO 1650

Until the sixteenth century, Britain and the Netherlands enjoyed a close, almost symbiotic, economic relationship. English and Scottish wool was exported for finishing in the Low Countries; there was a Scottish staple at Veere in Zeeland, and the wealth generated by the trade is still apparent, for example, in the scale of such great East Anglian churches as those at Long Melford and Lavenham and in the cloth halls of Flanders. But in the 1560s the Dutch rebelled against the rule of Philip II of Spain, and in due course this became both a war of independence and an ideological civil war. The Catholic south (roughly equivalent to modern Belgium) eventually chose to remain under Spanish rule, while the largely Calvinist north opted for independence as the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The strategic and economic importance of the Netherlands to England, and growing English hostility to Spain, forced Elizabeth I to provide more and more aid to the rebels, at first informally, but from 1585 formally under the terms of the Treaty of Nonsuch. An English army went to the Netherlands and remained there until 1604, while in return, four cautionary towns on the Scheldt estuary were placed under English control. They were returned to the Dutch only in 1616, a move that later English monarchs regretted; indeed, Charles II was to make the recapture of at least two of the cautionary towns one of his key strategic objectives in the third Anglo-Dutch war (1672–4).

This close alliance of two embattled Protestant nations against the might of Catholic Spain was breaking down even before King James I and VI withdrew from the war. The United Provinces quickly established itself as a new economic power in Europe, largely winning control of the carrying trades into the Baltic and Mediterranean. Antwerp, long the greatest port in Europe, lay far up the River Scheldt, and was easily blockaded by the Dutch who controlled one side of the river; their own chief harbour at Amsterdam grew concomitantly as a substitute for Antwerp. The Dutch overran the ramshackle but lucrative Portuguese possessions in the East Indies, which England also coveted.²⁰ During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, competition between the English and Dutch East India Companies, the EIC and the VOC (which had been founded at roughly the same time), became bitter and sometimes violent. There were also clashes over the North Sea fisheries, and one of the purposes originally intended for the Ship Money fleets was to bully the Dutch out of these lucrative fishing grounds. The Dutch were also building up a formidable reputation as a naval power, defeating the Spanish in several major encounters, most notably off Gibraltar in 1607 and in the Downs in 1639, literally under the noses of Charles I’s captains. The Dutch were particularly expansive and successful between 1609 and 1621, during a twelve years’ truce in their endless war of independence with Spain, but the resumption of that conflict, and England’s withdrawal from European war in 1629, allowed neutral English merchants to make inroads into Dutch markets, recapturing much of the carrying trade.

‘Atrocity stories’ recounting Dutch massacres in the East Indies became a staple of anti-Dutch propaganda throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars. The ‘Amboyna massacre’ of 1623 was dramatised by Dryden half a century later, and was still being used to blacken the reputation of the Dutch late in the eighteenth century.

In 1647–9, though, three important developments entirely altered the political and economic relationship between the two states. Firstly, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) brought both an end to eighty years of hostilities and grudging Spanish recognition of Dutch independence. Dutch merchants rapidly resumed their dominance of the carrying trades thanks to their ability to undercut the costs of all their rivals, especially the English.²¹ Secondly, the execution of Charles I in 1649 led to the creation of a new regime in England that seemed superficially to have much in common with its fellow Protestant republic of the United Provinces. In reality, though, the English Commonwealth was driven by a very different political and religious ideology, and detested both the perennial Dutch tolerance of other faiths (especially Catholicism) and their apparent economic success at England’s expense.²² Merchants were strongly represented in the new regime and its naval administration, and many of them were driven by the relatively new economic doctrine of‘mercantilism’, a belief that the amount of trade in the world was limited and that aggressive economic policies could thus increase the wealth and power of the state. Thirdly, in 1647 William II of Orange had become stadholder* of the United Provinces. The son-in-law of Charles I of England, he naturally sympathised with his Stuart relations, but his autocratic and centralising tendencies brought to a head the long-running power struggle between the House of Orange and the republican factions headed by the prosperous merchant class of Amsterdam, the ‘regents’, soon to be led by Johan de Witt, the brilliant and dynamic Grand Pensionary of Holland.²³

William II’s pro-Stuart agenda and his powerful position in the government of the Netherlands gave the new English Commonwealth yet more cause to be deeply suspicious of the United Provinces, but in 1650 William died suddenly of smallpox, leaving only a posthumous son, William. The republican factions seized control of the Dutch state and promptly rejected an offer of closer political union from the ‘Rump Parliament’ that ruled the Commonwealth: the humiliating treatment that the Rump’s commissioners received determined them, and their political masters, on coming to a reckoning with the United Provinces. Within two years, the two great Protestant republics of Western Europe were at war with each other, and in naval terms, the quarter-century that followed would become defined as the era of the Anglo-Dutch wars. Ultimately, in 1688, a massive Dutch-led invasion of Britain ousted the senior line of the Stuart royal family, and when England’s new joint monarchs were finally proclaimed on 13 February 1689, they were Queen Mary II, daughter of the ousted James II, and her Dutch husband King William III, the posthumous child born at the Binnenhof palace in The Hague in December 1650.

* See Part Eleven, Chapter 48, pp224-5.

* Stadholder = originally a kind of viceroy of the Spanish monarch; after independence, a de facto head of state, appointed separately (and sometimes intermittently) in each of the seven provinces of the Netherlands.

CHAPTER 2

Republic, Restoration and the Wars with the Dutch

THE INFANT COMMONWEALTH faced a formidable range of real or potential threats to its existence. Quite apart from its immediate rivalry with the Dutch, it faced an array of European kings filled with revulsion at the execution of a fellow monarch, notably those of England’s age-old rivals, Catholic France and Spain. There were still Royalist garrisons in the Scilly and Channel Islands, in the Isle of Man and in the New World, not to mention entire Royalist armies in both Ireland and Scotland. Unsurprisingly, the Rump ordered an immediate and substantial increase in the size of the navy: forty-five new warships were added between 1649 and 1651, doubling the size of the service, and many more soon followed. They were all state-owned, and most of them were purpose-built; the hired merchantmen that had dominated both the fleet sent out against the Armada six decades earlier and Parliament’s navy in the civil wars began to disappear from major English fleets. The control of the navy was also placed in very different hands. The higher administration was entrusted to a mixture of parliamentarians like Sir Henry Vane (1613–62) and prominent London merchants.¹ The highest commands at sea, traditionally the preserve of aristocrats like Lord Howard of Effingham, were given instead to former army officers who brought their old title into their new environment: the ‘generals-at-sea’, first appointed on 23 February 1649.² With orders both to shore up the uncertain political loyalty of a navy that had witnessed a major revolt so recently, and to instil into it the practices and discipline of Parliament’s victorious New Model Army, the first generals were all men who had at least limited experience of the sea, as well as unimpeachable records on land. Richard Deane (1610–53) had commanded merchant ships before becoming a prominent artillery officer and one of the signatories of Charles I’s death warrant; Edward Popham (c.1610–1651) had been an officer in the Ship Money fleets; while the most successful of them all, Robert Blake (1598–1657), failed in his aspiration to become a Fellow in an Oxford college and instead may have become a timber merchant in the Netherlands long before he became a successful cavalry and garrison commander in the civil war.³

Robert Blake, the greatest general-at-sea of the Interregnum era.

The first priority for the new republican navy was to deal with the remaining pockets of Royalist resistance. By the end of 1651, Blake in particular could claim responsibility for the capture of Jersey and the Scillies, giving support to Cromwell’s operations in Ireland and hounding Prince Rupert’s remaining Royalist ships out of their base at Lisbon. The last major Royalist campaign in England was defeated at Worcester on 3 September 1651. Just over a month later, the Rump Parliament passed the Navigation Act, which effectively barred the Dutch from transporting goods (including fish, on which the Dutch economy relied heavily) to or from England’s colonies. Both sides prepared for war. In May 1652 the Dutch attempted to run a large merchant convoy through the English Channel, escorted by a fleet of forty-two ships warships under Maarten Tromp. For the Dutch, keeping the Channel open was critical; it was their usual route to and from their foreign markets and the East Indies, and English control of the sea lane would have forced them either to face the dangers of the only alternative route, northabout around Scotland, or else to abandon those trades entirely, with potentially catastrophic economic consequences. Off Dover, Tromp encountered a British squadron of only twelve warships under Robert Blake.* The Dutchman refused to give the ‘salute to the flag’, firing broke out, and despite their superiority in numbers the Dutch withdrew.⁴

Subsequent exchanges established no clear pattern. An engagement off Plymouth in August was indecisive, but when Blake encountered the abrasive new Dutch admiral Witte de With off the Kentish Knock on 28 September, his larger ships and superior firepower forced the Dutch to withdraw with a severe mauling. In November, though, the Dutch attempted to run a vast merchant convoy of some 400 ships through the Channel, escorted by eighty-eight warships under the reinstated Tromp. Blake sailed out to intercept them with only forty-two ships, and allowed Tromp to trap him between the Dutch fleet and Dungeness. Three British ships were lost, and the defeat would have been worse if Tromp had not decided to prioritise the safe transit of the convoy. The setback at Dungeness led to significant reform. Naval pay was raised to encourage recruitment, to twenty-four shillings a month for able seamen and nineteen shillings for ordinary (but this would be the last rise until 1797). The fleet was reorganised into three squadrons: by 1665 this had become definitively the ‘red, white and blue’, each with an admiral, vice-admiral and rear-admiral, a system that survived, on paper at least, for the remaining two centuries of the sailing navy era, and which still provides the rationale underpinning modern Britain’s system of maritime ensigns.⁵ By the summer of 1653, too, the reorganised fleet was ready to implement a new tactic, the ‘line of battle’. Its origins remain obscure, and there remains much debate over the process which led to the introduction of the tactic, over the way in which it was implemented and over the identity of the individual or individuals who should be given most credit for its introduction.*

In February 1653 the reorganised fleet had put to sea to intercept Tromp on his return voyage. The ‘battle of Portland’ developed into a running fight up the Channel, from which the Dutch escaped only after losing at least twelve ships. On 2 and 3 June the two sides fought again off the Gabbard shoal. Implementing the new line tactics for the first time, the British fleet won a stunning success, capturing or sinking seventeen ships. The triumph was marred by the death of Richard Deane, cut in half by a cannonball on the quarterdeck of his flagship Resolution in the early stages of the battle; his new co-general George Monck hastily threw a cloak over the mangled corpse. The victory at the Gabbard permitted Monck to implement a close blockade of the Dutch coast, tightening the stranglehold on the Netherlands’ vital maritime trade. In a desperate attempt to relieve the situation, Tromp was ordered to sea. On 31 July he fought a running battle against Monck between Scheveningen and the Texel. The battle was one of the most ferocious and bloody of the entire sailing era. The Dutch allegedly suffered 6,000 casualties, among them Tromp, who fell early in the battle.⁶ The Commonwealth’s navy had earned a reputation for victory to eclipse even that won by Elizabeth I’s seamen.

On 16 December 1653, following a series of political upheavals within the republican government, Oliver Cromwell (1598–1658) was appointed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. The victor of Marston Moor, Naseby, Drogheda, Dunbar and Worcester had the degree of understanding of naval matters that one might expect from a man who had spent most of his first forty-four years as a farmer in the western Fens, and most of the next eleven as a commander of cavalry. Fortunately, he exercised little influence over the day-to-day running of the service, but Cromwell had very clear ideas on ideology and foreign policy, and he had always been opposed to the principle of war with fellow Protestants, including the Dutch.⁷ When the new Lord Protector took over the government, the Dutch economy was in desperate straits thanks to the British navy’s stranglehold of its trade. The United Provinces had lost anything up to 1,500 merchant ships, and the likes of Monck were arguing vociferously that one more campaign would finish them off. However, Cromwell did not want a defeated and resentful Dutch state becoming a likely springboard for Royalist plots against him; he also had an eye to public opinion, viewing a reduction in the inevitably high wartime taxation as an obvious way to make his shaky new regime more popular. Therefore, he agreed to surprisingly generous peace terms in the Treaty of Westminster (April 1654).⁸

The Battle of Dungeness, as depicted in a contemporary Dutch broadsheet.

(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

FROM THE TREATY OF WESTMINSTER TO THE RESTORATION

The deaths of Popham and Deane necessitated the appointment of new generals-at-sea. George Monck (1608–70), appointed in November 1652, had experience exclusively on land, and had been fighting for the Royalists as recently as 1644, before a spell in the Tower of London convinced him of the merits of changing sides. After commanding at sea in the latter stages of the first Dutch war, Monck returned to land service as commander of the army in occupied Scotland, and remained there until 1660. William Penn (1621–70), appointed in December 1653, had far more maritime experience than his predecessors, having served at sea in his youth and commanded there throughout the Civil War; his more famous eponymous son, William Penn the Quaker, would become the founder of Pennsylvania. Edward Montagu (1625–72), appointed in January 1656, another land officer, owed his rapid elevation to his political closeness to his Huntingdonshire neighbour, Oliver Cromwell, and was almost certainly sent to sea to act as the Protector’s political ‘minder’ for Blake and his fleet. Montagu had already taken into his household another Huntingdonshire man and his relation by marriage, an obscure clerk named Samuel Pepys, who thus gained his first connection with the navy (and who would subsequently immortalise his ‘good lord’ Montagu in the pages of his diary).⁹

Cromwell’s determination to achieve peace with the Dutch was certainly not a portent of a pacifist foreign policy. In April 1654 the Lord Protector and his Council debated whether to attack France or Spain, the two great Catholic powers of Europe, and by making reference to the Armada, the ‘black legend’ of Spain’s militant Catholicism, and the untold wealth that might accrue to England if she successfully seized Spain’s American lands and trade, Cromwell was largely responsible for instigating the large-scale attack on the Caribbean that followed.¹⁰ The ‘Western Design’, an amphibious attack on Hispaniola, was placed under the command of William Penn, and the fleet sailed from Spithead on Christmas Day 1654. Poorly provisioned, ravaged by illness and blighted by acrimonious jealousies between Penn and the land commander, General Venables, the expedition was easily repulsed from Hispaniola, but succeeded in taking what at the time seemed a very poor alternative: Jamaica (May 1655).¹¹

During 1654–5 Blake’s fleet operated in the Mediterranean, primarily against the Barbary regency of Tunis. In 1656 he went out again in a joint command with Montagu, and after negotiating a treaty with Portugal, he instituted a blockade of the Spanish coast, hoping to intercept the incoming bullion flota from the Americas. In September 1656 a detached squadron under Richard Stayner successfully intercepted part of the flota, and on 20 April 1657 Blake attacked Tenerife, where the rest of the flota had taken shelter. Blake mounted a brilliant attack against a heavily armed squadron at anchor, defended also by batteries in the forts ringing the harbour, and sank all seventeen Spanish ships. Unfortunately, all the bullion had been taken off long before, and the victory was also Blake’s last: he died in August, as his ships entered Plymouth Sound at the end of their return voyage. Meanwhile, during the summers of 1657 and 1658 Montagu’s squadron supported the Anglo-French land operations on the Flanders coast which culminated in the capture of Dunkirk (June 1658). He then took his fleet into the Baltic in 1659, partly to protect English trading interests and partly to keep an eye on the Dutch, who seemed to be on the point of getting involved in the long-running war between Sweden and Denmark. When Montagu returned to home waters in August, domestic politics were in crisis following the death of Oliver Cromwell and the downfall of his son and successor Richard, and Montagu was forced into retirement after it was suggested that the unexpected return of his fleet might have been intended to aid a Royalist uprising.¹²

At key moments, the navy played a vital part in the sequence of events that led to the restoration of the monarchy. In December 1659 Vice-Admiral John Lawson (c.1615–1665) brought his squadron into the Thames and blockaded London, thereby helping to bring about the downfall of the military regime that had seized control two months earlier. The Rump Parliament that had been ousted in that coup was recalled once again.¹³ Meanwhile, the former general-at-sea George Monck advanced from Scotland with his army, and after reaching London in February 1660, he summoned a new parliament which ultimately voted to restore stability by restoring the monarchy. Royalist agents spent the latter part of 1659 and early months of 1660 feverishly attempting to win over the republic’s admirals. Montagu, recalled to service but secretly in touch with the king’s men for some time, was given command of the fleet despatched to the Netherlands to bring the royal family home. He sailed without waiting for the arrival of Parliament’s commissioners, who might have sought to impose significant conditions on Charles II before giving him back his throne.¹⁴ The king came aboard at Scheveningen on 23 May 1660, and immediately took possession of his navy in a very personal and symbolic way: Montagu’s flagship, the Naseby, named after the decisive defeat of Charles’s father in 1645, was renamed Royal Charles by the new monarch.¹⁵ Montagu and Monck had already quietly purged the navy of many officers loyal to the old regime, and this process continued after the king’s return.

THE NEW ROYAL NAVY AND THE SECOND ANGLO-DUTCH WAR

The restored king lavished rewards on those who had engineered his return home. Montagu became Earl of Sandwich;* George Monck, nominally joint-general-at-sea with him in 1660, became Duke of Albemarle. Samuel Pepys became Clerk of the Acts, nominally the most junior of the four principal officers of the Navy Board; William Penn became a commissioner of the navy. However, both in theory and in practice, the higher direction of the navy became very much a royal ‘sphere of influence’. King Charles II (1630–85) had developed a lifelong love of the sea during his exile in Jersey in 1646, and rapidly introduced the Dutch sport of yachting to England. Charles delighted in his ships: in finalising their designs, in selecting names for them, in choosing appropriate officers for them and in deciding on where they should be deployed, sometimes to the chagrin of those who were nominally entrusted with such decisions. He would also give Britain her ultimate naval icon. In 1672 he ordered the stamping on his copper coins of the familiar image of Britannia, supposedly modelled by one of his many old flames.

Charles’s less pragmatic and less tolerant brother James, Duke of York (1633–1701; King James II and VII, 1685–88) served as Lord High Admiral of England from 1660 to 1673, and he too was no cipher, taking a strong and direct interest in many aspects of naval policy. In this he was assisted by his secretaries, especially Sir William Coventry (1627–86), who served until 1667 and whose command of business, minute attention to detail and clear perception of naval issues made him both an important figure in the early development of the Restoration navy and one of the most influential role models for the impressionable Pepys.¹⁶ James retained a powerful informal influence in naval affairs even after his conversion to Catholicism drove him from office in 1673, and he resumed effective control over the navy in 1684. The attitudes of the two Stuart brothers did much to shape the development of their Royal Navy from 1660 to 1688.

King Charles II, whose interest in the navy extended well beyond a faddish enthusiasm for yachting and ship design.

(ANONYMOUS MEZZOTINT)

In the event, the elder brother’s marriage also provided pointers for the future direction of the service. At the Garrison Church, Portsmouth, on 21 May 1662 Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, daughter of the King of Portugal (which had declared its independence from Spain in 1640). Catherine’s dowry included two new overseas possessions for England: Bombay, now Mumbai, and Tangier. At the time, the Moroccan port seemed a far more important acquisition than the future ‘Gate of India’. A British garrison had already taken possession of Tangier, in January 1662, and construction soon began on a huge breakwater, the Mole, which was intended to shelter both a powerful Mediterranean fleet and the trade of all nations, drawn inexorably to this new entrepot (and undermining Dutch dominance in the process). The development of Tangier was one element in a strong focus on Africa during the early years of Charles II’s rule. In 1663 the precursor of the later Royal African Company was founded, headed by the Duke of York and comprising many of the prominent ministers and courtiers of the time. Its overt objective was to eject the Dutch from West Africa and to gain control of the wealth of the area (including its slave trade).¹⁷ An expedition went out to the Gambia in 1661, commanded by a veteran of Prince Rupert’s Royalist squadron, the charismatic Robert Holmes (c.1622–1692), and ejected the Dutch from one of their forts. Holmes went out again in 1663–4, capturing various Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast. An equally aggressive policy was being implemented in America, where in August 1664 one of James’s household, Colonel Richard Nicholls, forced the surrender of New Amsterdam, renaming it New York after his patron.

Britannia, originally modelled by Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, shown here on a medal commemorating the Peace of Breda (1667).

(RICHARD ENDSOR COLLECTION)

This steady escalation of colonial conflict was symptomatic of rapidly deteriorating relations between the restored monarchy and the Dutch. The Commonwealth’s Navigation Act had been renewed in 1660 and extended in 1662 and 1663, and in October 1664 an enthusiastic Parliament voted an unprecedented £2,500,000 for a war. Charles and James were anxious for military triumphs to prove themselves the equals of Cromwell, courtiers and merchants alike were belligerent, while the likes of Albemarle and Sir John Lawson sought to complete the annihilation of the Dutch that they believed Cromwell had denied to them in 1654.¹⁸ The unilateral seizure of Dutch vessels in British waters was announced in December 1664, and war was declared in London on 4 March 1665. The Duke of York took command of a fleet of 109 ships and 21,000 men; his captains and subordinate admirals included both former Parliamentarians like Sandwich, Penn, Lawson and Christopher Myngs (c.1625–1666), side by side with former Royalists like Holmes and his colourful fellow Irishman Edward Spragge (c.1629–1673). Off Lowestoft on 3 June 1665 the British fleet achieved a crushing victory, albeit one marred by the death of Sir John Lawson. At least seventeen Dutch ships were lost, among them the flagship Eendracht, which blew up at the height of the battle. Six thousand Dutchmen were killed or captured. However, the battle, and the 1665 campaign as a whole, ended in frustration. A mysterious order for the fleet to slacken sail during the night of 3–4 June allowed the rest of the Dutch to escape, and James’s close shave during the battle (three of his closest friends, standing next to him on the quarterdeck, were decapitated by a chainshot) persuaded Charles II to bring his heir ashore. Sandwich took command of the fleet and took it north in September to intercept the incoming Dutch East India fleet in the neutral harbour of Bergen, but the attack was bungled, contributing to the subsequent Danish declaration of war on England – and also on Scotland, which suffered proportionately more in this conflict with one of her closest trading partners. Sandwich then became embroiled in an embarrassing (but correct) claim that he had embezzled prize goods from a detached group of East India ships that were taken at sea, and had to be ‘kicked upstairs’ (and afar) as Charles II’s new ambassador to Spain.¹⁹

James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral of England (1660-73), of Ireland and the Plantations (1660-85) and of Scotland (1672-85); King James II and VII, 1685-8. Often portrayed in martial garb, James prided himself on his military and naval credentials. This portrait by Henri Gascar shows him as a Roman warrior, with his flagship in the background.

(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)

Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich; general-at-sea for Cromwell, admiral and ambassador for Charles II, and the early patron of Samuel Pepys.

In January 1666 France, too, declared war to fulfil long-avoided treaty obligations to the Dutch. The command of the British fleet for the 1666 campaign was given jointly to Prince Rupert and George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, but at the end of May they divided their fleet, with Rupert sailing off to the west to intercept a French fleet that was believed to be approaching British waters. The intelligence proved false, and on 1 June Albemarle found himself with fifty-six ships, facing the Dutch fleet of eighty-six under the brilliant Michiel de Ruyter off the North Foreland. The ‘Four Days’ Battle’ that followed was one of the great epics of the age of sail. Rupert rejoined on the third day with twenty-five ships, but after another day of fighting, the British fleet was forced to retire, having lost three admirals captured or killed (one of the latter being the much loved Christopher Myngs), several thousand men and ten ships, including the great Royal Prince.²⁰ The British did significantly better in an engagement on 25 July, St James’s Day, when they so battered the Dutch fleet that it could not return to sea for a month. This was followed in August by a viciously clinical raid on Dutch merchant shipping in the Vlie anchorage, an attack named ‘Holmes’s Bonfire’ after its ubiquitous commander.

By the end of 1666, though, the British war effort was in serious trouble. The parliamentary subsidies had already run out (leading to inevitable accusations of misappropriation), while London had been ravaged successively by the Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666. In the belief that a peace treaty would be agreed rapidly in 1667, Charles and his ministers decided to save money by laying up the main fleet and relying on coastal fortifications and fast frigate squadrons to defend the country. The Dutch had other ideas, and Johan de Witt was determined to end the war with a bold and humiliating stroke. On 7 June 1667 a fleet of eighty warships under de Ruyter entered the Thames. The days that followed witnessed the frantic sinking of blockships to prevent the Dutch reaching London; the decision to create the main sunken barrier at Blackwall belonged to King Charles II himself, over-ruling the ‘experts’ of Trinity House.²¹ One of the last ‘invasions’ of mainland England took place when the Dutch landed at Harwich on 1 July; they were repelled by the newly formed Royal Marines, who thus gained their first battle honour. The cataclysmic summer also saw one of the worst defeats in British military history: arguably, the worst of all. The Dutch broke the boom that protected the River Medway on 12 June 1667, the defences of Chatham proved inadequate (or had never been completed in the first place), and four of the largest British ships were lost, along with eight smaller vessels. The Royal Charles, the former Naseby, was towed away to the Netherlands, and remained there long after the signing of the Treaty of Breda on 21 July 1667.

THE THIRD ANGLO-DUTCH WAR

The three years after Breda witnessed a period of complex and confusing diplomacy which culminated in Charles II and Louis XIV agreeing the secret Treaty of Dover (22 May 1670).²² This provided for a joint Anglo-French land and sea assault on the United Provinces, and during 1671–2 the complex organisation of an Anglo-French combined fleet was negotiated and eventually agreed, while elaborate pretexts for war were manufactured.²³ These included the surreal incident in August 1671 when the yacht carrying the returning wife of the English ambassador at The Hague deliberately sailed through a Dutch fleet in an attempt to provoke it into opening fire. Before war was formally declared, Holmes and Spragge cynically attacked the returning Dutch Smyrna fleet (March 1672). The Duke of York resumed command of the fleet, but on 28 May de Ruyter attacked the British and French ships in Sole Bay. In the confusion that followed, the French squadron sailed south and the two English squadrons north, so that the English rear (or Blue) squadron under Sandwich bore the brunt of de Ruyter’s attack. His flagship, the Royal James, was attacked by Dutch fireships and burned; Sandwich took to the water to escape the flames, and was drowned. There was no other significant action at sea in 1672, but for a time it looked very much as though there would not need to be. French armies poured into the Netherlands in May and June and very nearly overran the entire country. Only the opening of the dykes saved the western areas of Holland and Zeeland, creating a vast waterline of flooded territory that French troops could not cross. As ever in extremis, the Dutch turned once more to the House of Orange. The twenty-two-year-old William III was invested as stadholder and captain-general of the forces; his old rival Johan de Witt was quite literally torn to pieces by the Hague mob.

The passing of the Test Act in March 1673 drove Catholics from public office, and among their number was James, Duke of York, the Lord High Admiral, who had converted in the late 1660s. He was replaced by a new Admiralty Commission, nominally headed by Prince Rupert. Samuel Pepys moved from the Navy Board to become secretary to this new body, although in practice he became almost a personal naval secretary to the king, who took on most of the Admiralty’s important functions himself.²⁴ For the 1673 campaign at sea, Charles brought his brother ashore once again and gave command of the fleet to Rupert, despite the fact that he was known to be cool about the French alliance. Charles and his ministers envisaged a landing in the Netherlands that would lead to the annexation of at least part of Zeeland, and at sea Rupert sought to bring the numerically weaker Dutch fleet to battle to clear the way for the invasion flotilla. However, de Ruyter had no intention of playing into his hands, brilliantly using his shoal waters to keep his fleet intact and frustrate the combined fleet – as two indecisive battles in the Schooneveld on 28 May and 4 June demonstrated. Battle was finally joined off Kijkduin on 11 August in what became known to the English as the battle of the Texel. Once again, the conduct of the French led to a barrage of criticism in England: whether by accident or (it was rumoured) by dint of direct orders from King Louis XIV, they stood aside from the main fighting for most of the day.²⁵ Meanwhile, the two English squadrons became detached from each other, with Rupert engaging de Ruyter, and Spragge, in the rear, engaging Cornelis Tromp, the son of the great Dutch commander killed in almost exactly the same waters almost exactly twenty years earlier. This time, it was the Tromp family’s opponent who perished, Spragge drowning when a shot sank his boat as he tried to switch his flag to a fresh ship. Tactically, the battle was indecisive, but strategically, the Dutch had kept their fleet intact, covered the return of their valuable East Indies convoy, and forced Charles to abandon his invasion plans.

Fighting alongside expansionist, Catholic France had never been popular in England, and the widespread perception of French perfidy at the Texel only exacerbated matters.²⁶ Merchant shipping had also suffered heavily at the hands of Dutch privateers, an unexpected consequence of the Dutch decision to risk abandoning their maritime trade entirely in order to man both their state-owned and private warships. William of Orange’s treaty with Spain (August 1673) threatened global warfare and even worse damage to Britain’s overseas trades.²⁷ In the autumn of 1673 Charles II’s ministry fell, and by the Treaty of Westminster (February 1674) Britain unilaterally withdrew from the war, leaving the Dutch and the French to carry on their struggle for another five years. In effect, the treaty passed over matters of substance and simply adjusted the outcomes of some of the nasty but relatively insignificant campaigns that had taken place overseas. St Helena, lost and then retaken during the war, eventually found a role as a prison for Napoleon Bonaparte. New York, lost in the war but restored in the treaty, eventually found other raisons d’être.

The humiliating aftermath of the Dutch raid on the Medway, 1667: the flagship Royal Charles being taken back to the Netherlands by a prize crew.

(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)

THE NEW ENEMY: BRITAIN, FRANCE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN, 1674–1688

From 1674 onwards, and despite the continuing francophilia of both the royal brothers, Charles and James, anti-French sentiment was strong in both Parliament and the country at large. Fears over Louis XIV’s expansionism and concerns about the rapid growth of the French navy, negligible in 1660 but larger than Britain’s by almost three to two in 1675, prompted even a parsimonious and suspicious House of Commons to vote funds for a massive naval construction programme that began in 1677.²⁸ The ‘thirty new ships’ were on the stocks when the fleet mobilised for war in 1678, this time against France, but further political upheavals at home and the progress of the Franco-Dutch peace negotiations at Nijmegen prevented an actual outbreak of hostilities. The discovery in the same year of the ‘Popish plot’, an alleged Catholic plot to assassinate Charles and replace him with James, led to mass hysteria, political crisis, the departure of Pepys from the Admiralty and the creation in April 1679 of a new Admiralty Board composed largely of opposition parliamentarians committed to a policy of retrenchment. Even so, they did not overturn the organisational changes that Charles and James had introduced into the navy in the 1670s, notably the institution in 1677 of a qualifying examination for the office of lieutenant – probably the single most important step in the development of a meritocratic naval profession.²⁹

During these years, by far the largest part of the navy’s operational warships was based in the Mediterranean, fighting intermittent wars against the North African regencies of Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis and Salé (Sallee, Morocco). By the 1670s Tangier was a heavily fortified, populous and controversial English colony, widely rumoured to be a hotbed of popery and sexual perversion, but despite all the ongoing effort and expenditure on its giant breakwater, it proved less than satisfactory as a naval anchorage. Moreover, it was too far to the west to be of much use as an operational base against the major Barbary states, so British admirals looked for alternatives. Arrangements, usually of an informal nature and not unconnected to ‘gifts’ to local governors, were made to use the facilities at Port Mahon (1670–1), Malta (1675–6) and Gibraltar (1680, 1685–9).³⁰ In this way, naval officers gained direct first-hand experience of what would eventually become the three main British naval bases in the Mediterranean, and this personal knowledge undoubtedly later contributed to the successful captures of Gibraltar and Port Mahon in 1704 and 1708 respectively. Sir John Narbrough (1640–88) commanded a large fleet in the Mediterranean in 1674–8, but experienced only limited success against Tripoli and Tunis; despite having smaller resources available to him, his successor Arthur Herbert (c.1648–1716) achieved better results, obtaining a peace with Algiers in 1682 that was to endure until 1816. Herbert’s success came despite Pepys’s damning and not entirely fair judgement of him as a perverted, corrupt, drunken incompetent.³¹

Arthur Herbert, later Earl of Torrington, admiral in the Mediterranean from 1679 to 1683 and a staunch opponent of Samuel Pepys.

In almost equally colourful terms, Pepys also condemned the Admiralty Commission that had replaced him in 1679, but his claims that they were responsible for a precipitate decline in Britain’s naval strength were largely unfounded, and motivated primarily by sour grapes. Under-investment in the navy was an inevitable consequence of Charles II’s determination to rule without Parliament after 1681, following his final defeat of its attempts to exclude his brother from the succession to the throne.³² Another consequence of this newfound royal parsimony was the decision to abandon Tangier to save money. A fleet went out in 1683 under George Legge, Lord Dartmouth (1648–91), one of many officers of the period who had simultaneous naval and army careers. Dartmouth oversaw the evacuation and demolition of Tangier, including that of the still incomplete breakwater; the expedition was minutely chronicled by his secretary pro tem, the ubiquitous Samuel Pepys. The return of Dartmouth and Pepys to England in 1684 was soon followed by the dismissal of the Admiralty Commission. Charles II resumed control of naval affairs himself, assisted formally by Pepys as a French-style ‘minister of the marine’ in all but name, and informally by his brother, the Duke of York. A few months later,