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The Comfort Zone

21/05/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Historical research, Historical sources, Naval history, Welsh history | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A Falklands War

14/05/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

There have been plenty of blogs to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands / Malvinas conflict, along with day-by-day ‘as live’ Twitter feeds and so forth, so I’ve been a bit reluctant to add to the mix. But finally I decided that some might find my recollections and observations interesting; as far as I can see there’s been very little coverage of civilian reactions, and I suppose I was both a particularly interested civilian and one who, for various reasons, had some unique insights into what took place.

Friday 2 April 1982 was an ordinary working day for me. I was teaching at a comprehensive school in Newquay, Cornwall, although I’d already resigned in order to return to Oxford in the summer to begin work on my doctorate, and was living in a quite astonishingly decrepit flat known throughout Newquay as ‘the Hovel’. The first I knew of that day’s Argentinian invasion of the Falklands was when I turned on the BBC’s six o’clock news, and I can still vividly remember my reactions. Astonishment, certainly, despite all the news stories in previous weeks about escalating tension and scrap dealers on South Georgia; trepidation about the potential implications; but also I have to admit that I felt a certain excitement when I heard Margaret Thatcher’s words about a task force being made ready to sail south. I’d been a ‘warship spotter’ since childhood, but the 1960s and 1970s had seen the Royal Navy (and, apart from Northern Ireland, the armed forces as a whole) involved in very little real action. So the prospect of the ships whose careers I’d followed for so long actually preparing for even the possibility of serious combat was something I felt I had to witness at first hand. On Saturday, therefore, I drove over to Plymouth, about an hour away, and stood on the Torpoint shore watching as the LSLs – the ‘Knight’ class landing ships like Sir Galahad - being loaded. I then returned to Newquay as I was due to play in a darts tournament that night (for those who don’t know, I was once a pretty decent darts player, even reaching the dizzy heights of the Varsity match!). I vividly remember that one of the opposition players was already wearing something that he must have obtained that day from one of the many T-shirt printers in Newquay – a shirt bearing a Union Jack and the legend ‘F*** Argentina’.

During the course of the tournament I decided that I would drive to Portsmouth the next day to see what was happening there, despite the fact that it was a journey of four hours or more. Getting up at 3.30 AM, I drove along the main roads along the south coast, past Lyme Regis, Weymouth and Bournemouth, so I was probably one of relatively few witnesses to the streams of military traffic going in both directions at that hour of the day. At Portsmouth I spent most of the day on the Gosport shore watching Harriers flying onto the deck of Invincible; the carriers never usually sailed with their air wings embarked, but it was clear that the planes were being flown on to them in harbour so that the ships could sail with the Harriers arrayed on deck, an obvious show of force and a warning to the Argentinians. It was clear from what I had seen at both Plymouth and Portsmouth that the dockyard workers were making astonishing efforts to get the ships ready for sea within such an unbelievably short timescale. I contemplated staying over in Portsmouth to see the carriers sail on the Monday and phoning in ‘sick’, but conscience prevailed (something which I regretted, so when the chance came some months later to see Fearless, Intrepid and Brilliant return to Plymouth, sailing behind the latter up the Tamar in one of the harbour cruise boats as the tugs fired red, white and blue waterjets in salute, I duly manufactured a tactical ‘stomach bug’ – unprofessional, perhaps, but seeing history always beats teaching it).

The war itself was an utterly surreal time. For a long time, of course, nothing happened – the task force was sailing south, the UN and the Americans were attempting mediation efforts, and inevitably, in the classrooms and bars of Newquay punditry and rumour-mongering were rife. I followed developments avidly: all sorts of ships were being acquired (the SS Uganda, on which I had spent my first extended period at sea during a schools Mediterranean cruise in 1971, was converted into a hospital ship), old Tribal-class frigates in reserve at Chatham were recommissioned to cover the North Atlantic as the newer ships sailed south, and so forth. But matters were clearly getting more serious and closer to home. Two of the players on our darts team were air crew at RAF St Mawgan, and one week they were at the match, the next they weren’t; their Nimrod surveillance aircraft had been deployed to Ascension Island. Finally the ‘shooting war’ started with the sinkings of the General Belgrano and the Sheffield, then the landings at San Carlos and the advance overland. Even by pre-Internet 1982 standards, the information available was frustratingly sparse. I still remember the sombre tone of the Ministry of Defence spokesman Ian MacDonald presenting the terse official bulletin that recounted the loss of HMS Sheffield – the first sinking in action of a Royal Navy warship in my lifetime, and thus an event that shocked me profoundly. There was a hushed silence in the pub, and afterwards people spoke in whispers; there was talk that Margaret Thatcher would see the Queen that night for a formal declaration of war, and the ever-bullish and down to earth darts team captain advanced his own theory that Britain should simply sail a Polaris submarine up the River Plate and anchor it in full view of Buenos Aires.

Of course, there was worse to come, notably the attack on the landing ships Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram at Bluff Cove on 8 June. The casualties among the Welsh Guards were terrible, but even then I realised the dreadful irony that there were probably casualties with Welsh blood and Welsh names on the other side too – the heirs of the Welsh colony in Patagonia. What I did not know, and only learned many years later when I researched my family history, was that one of those who perished on Sir Galahad was a distant cousin of mine, Guardsman Eirwyn Phillips – a cousin I had never known, and now never would.

And then, quite suddenly, it was all over. Despite the steady advance and encirclement of Port Stanley, very few seemed to have expected the surrender to come quite as quickly as it did; indeed, some of my older and more gung-ho pupils were clearly disappointed that it had ended so soon. For me, though, I suppose the end came on 17 September 1982, a couple of weeks after I’d moved to Oxford, when I took a train down to Portsmouth very early in the morning to watch Invincible and Bristol return home. I was there early enough to scramble up a drainpipe onto the roof of the Round Tower’s flanking battery, a distinctly unsafe vantage point given the lack of fencing – but many were already up there (and helped to haul me up), and many more joined us. The day was very hot and there was an intense heat haze in the Solent. Finally the huge bulk of Invincible loomed out of the mist, and as she appeared a chant went up from the crowd: ‘Easy! Easy!’. Even then, I felt uncomfortable about such rampant triumphalism; regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war, and of the rival claims to the islands, one thing the war of 1982 had certainly not been was ‘easy’.

 

(I’d hoped to include some of my 1982 photos with this post, but various technical problems have defeated me. With luck I’ll put them online in an additional post sometime this week.)

Posted in Naval history | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Coast of Ages

07/05/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

I spent the whole of last week on a Britannia’s Dragon research trip in north-west Wales. Coming originally from the south-west of the country, where it’s far easier and quicker to get to London than to the north, I knew Anglesey and Snowdonia quite well but didn’t really know the Llyn Peninsula, and this proved to be a revelation – in terms of stunning scenery, fascinating history and a sometimes total absence of such alleged requisites of modern living as mobile phone reception and internet access. We were staying in a converted chapel on the old pilgrim route along the peninsula to Bardsey island, and evidence of the importance of pilgrimage was everywhere, nowhere moreso than in the astonishing church of St Beuno at Clynnog Fawr, larger than several cathedrals I’ve visited yet located in a village smaller than the one where we live. The week also involved some walking, notably a strenuous climb up to the Tre’r Ceiri hill fort, and a visit to Sir Clough Williams Ellis’s surreal creation at Portmeirion, best known of course as the setting for the cult TV series The Prisoner. 

But of course I was in the area primarily to work. My days at Anglesey and Caernarfon record offices were very productive, particularly the former (which produced inter alia what must be the most graphic description ever written of the state of the toilets on a World War I battleship). Both proved to be very pleasant working environments, both manned by really helpful and friendly staff and with that at Caernarfon enjoying some of the best views of any repository I’ve ever worked on; the search room looks out directly onto the quayside of the old dock, now filled with yachts and with the waters of the Menai Straits beyond. ‘Fieldwork’ took me to many places with direct or indirect naval connections. By far the most poignant of the former was the huge memorial and mass grave in Holyhead cemetery to those who died aboard the submarine HMS Thetis in 1939, which failed to surface after her first trial dive; the vessel was subsequently recovered, beached in Moelfre Bay and eventually put into service as HMS Thunderbolt. Other locations which will feature in Britannia’s Dragon included the site of HMS Glendower, the wartime training base on the south coast of the Llyn Peninsula, far better known in its later incarnation as Butlin’s Pwllheli. It’s unfortunate that there’s no memorial marking its naval service, in contrast to the situation at Butlin’s Skegness which was the wartime HMS Royal Arthur; both bases were the result of deals struck between the far-sighted but somewhat unscrupulous Billy Butlin and the Admiralty. (The book will include an account of the deliciously fraught meeting in 1945 when the local MPs, including Lloyd George’s daughter Lady Megan, discovered just how comprehensively Butlin had outmanoeuvred them, driving a coach and horses through planning regulations – suspended in wartime – and creating a vast holiday camp in the midst of the heartland of the Welsh language and culture.)

A site which certainly does proclaim its naval heritage is the astonishing Parys Mountain on the north coast of Anglesey, once the largest copper mine in the world. The discovery of this huge resource in 1768 coincided providentially with the Royal Navy’s adoption of copper sheathing and with the outbreak less than a decade later of the American revolutionary war, which hugely increased the demand for that sheathing. The nearby port of Amlwch was transformed into the world’s largest copper port and the second largest town in Wales, about half the size of late C18th century New York. Parys Mountain is remarkable but somewhat unsettling, a vast scar on the landscape literally carved out of the heart of a hill – and, in the early years at least, carved out principally by manual labour and hand tools alone.

So all in all, it was a very good week which contributed a substantial amount of material to the book. Although a considerable amount of additional research still lies ahead, the writing phase starts tomorrow!

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Aristocrats

30/04/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

When this post goes ‘live’ I’ll actually be beavering away in the search room of Anglesey Archives in Llangefni, where I hope to obtain some useful material for Britannia’s Dragon. I’ll report back on my North Wales research trip next week, but in the meantime I thought I’d explore a theme that connects my current fiction and non-fiction projects.

One of the key themes underpinning the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’ is the hero’s complex relationship with his tangled family history, which often impinges on his progress as a ‘gentleman captain’ in the navy of King Charles II. This was one of the very first plot strands that I settled on when I started to develop the first book, Gentleman Captain, so as well as mapping out Matthew’s own character and immediate relationships, I also developed an intricate ‘back story’ which involved creating an entire Quinton dynasty dating back to the Norman Conquest and which is granted an earldom for service rendered to Henry V at Agincourt. Several aspects of this back story have already surfaced in the books – the death of Matthew’s father at the Battle of Naseby, and the impact this has on him; the importance of the role model provided by his grandfather the eighth earl, a larger-than-life swashbuckling Elizabethan seadog; and enigmatic references to court scandal involving his mother in the early years of Charles I’s reign. The new Quinton book, The Blast That Tears The Skies, develops several of these strands and adds some new ones that stretch even further back into the family’s history. Ben Yarde-Buller, my publisher, suggested that it might be helpful to readers to provide a family tree, so this is duly provided at the start of the book – commencing with the fourth Earl of Ravensden, a tough old warrior who fights in Henry VIII’s wars before marrying a former nun who lives to a very great age, outliving all her sons in the process.

Of course, in creating the ‘back story’ for the Quintons I had several real aristocratic families and actual individuals in mind. An obvious ‘dynasty’ with a similarly distinguished record of service over many generations would be the various branches of the Howards; others like the Dudleys rose, flourished and fell, while some like the Churchills produced outstanding figures a few generations apart. On Anglesey I’m not far from Plas Newydd, seat of the Pagets, Marquesses of Anglesey. The first Lord Paget was a prominent statesman of the middle Tudor period; his descendant the first Marquess of Anglesey led the cavalry charge at Waterloo, losing his leg in the process (the artificial replacement is preserved at Plas Newydd). Two of his brothers and two of his sons were prominent naval officers, all of whom will feature in Britannia’s Dragon, while several others, including the current marquess, served in the army, in Parliament, and so forth. I know this is a familiar story in many respects – wander around many a stately home in Britain and you’ll see endless portraits of younger sons in army or naval uniforms. But it’s actually quite an unusual story in Wales, partly because the Welsh aristocracy was so much smaller than its counterparts in the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom and partly because their history has been much more neglected. The Scottish nobility, owning grand castles and estates larger than many an independent country while being perceived as responsible for such injustices as the Highland Clearances, has been hugely prominent in the country’s history, has been studied in depth in many books and retains considerable influence; it’s hardly surprising that the first hereditary peer to be elected to the House of Commons should sit for a seat in the far north of Scotland that his family has represented for most of the period since 1780.  The Irish aristocracy of the ‘ascendancy’ has been studied and vilified in roughly equal measure; the shells of their great houses, burned down by the IRA in 1918-22, stand throughout Ireland as testimony to their dramatic downfall.

The Welsh aristocracy has no equivalent history of power, oppression or doomed romance. Apart from the occasional rant by Lloyd George or the odd Communist, the class as a whole has been virtually ignored. But then, for long periods of Welsh history there was no aristocracy at all; for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the counties of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, two of the most prosperous in the Principality, had no noble families domiciled in them, and for most of the rest of that period there was only one in each county. There was a gentry and squirearchy, but generally they were far poorer and less influential than their English equivalents. Their houses were more modest, too – the vast exceptions like Penrhyn and Cardiff Castles were often built by outsiders or those with ‘new money’.  But the stories of Welsh aristocratic families are worth telling, and in Britannia’s Dragon I’ll be focusing both on the seamen on the lower deck and on the likes of the Pagets and Sub-Lieutenant Micky Wynn, RNVR. Who he? In 1942 Wynn commanded one of the MTBs on the St Nazaire raid, supporting HMS Campbeltown (Lt-Cdr Stephen Beattie, another Welshman, who was awarded the VC) and performing heroics before losing an eye and being captured by the Germans, eventually ending up in Colditz. Wynn later inherited his family’s title and became the seventh Baron Newborough, owner of the Rhug estate in Denbighshire. Let Wikipedia’s bare entry record the bizarre sequel:

In 1976 he was called before the magistrates for allegedly firing a 9 lb (4.1 kg) cannon ball across the Menai Strait…the shot went through the sail of a passing yacht and he was charged with causing criminal damage. Even though it was his mother-in-law’s birthday, he denied the charge, protesting that it must have been someone else. He was found guilty and fined. He died in Istanbul in 1998 and his ashes were shot out of an 18th-century cannon.

I think both Matthew Quinton and his grandfather the old Elizabethan sea-dog would have thoroughly approved of Micky Wynn, Lord Newborough!

Posted in Naval historical fiction, Naval history, Uncategorized, Welsh history | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Navy and Nation

23/04/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

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

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

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

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

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The McEnroe Moment

09/04/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Every now and again, a historian comes across a snippet of information so bizarre that he or she reacts by silently quoting a certain illustrious tennis player – ‘you cannot be serious!’. (Or at least, that would be the case for historians of my generation; those born after, say, 1980, might prefer the current de rigueur exclamation of choice in tweets and text messages, ‘WTF?’) It’s often said that there’s a considerable similarity between the instincts and working methods of historians and policeman, and the discovery of such a snippet at once transforms even the most mild-mannered historian into Inspector Morse, relentlessly pursuing the solution to the mystery at the expense of all else – perhaps abandoning rather more pressing assignments in the process.

I have to confess that I’m particularly prone to this tendency. It was a ‘McEnroe moment’ that set me off on the ten year odyssey to explore the mysterious ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600, which eventually culminated in my book Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the Gowrie Conspiracy, in the process putting other projects on the back burner, acquiring a couple of bookcases’ worth of Scottish history, and fearlessly conducting research in archives, castles and pubs from Perth to Carmarthen via Maidstone and North Berwick to the Loire valley. (OK, perhaps the pubs weren’t strictly essential to the parameters of the project, but I always seemed to obtain some of my best insights in them.) I’ve been intrigued for a couple of years now by such oddities as why the Earl of Southesk killed the Master of Gray in the distinctly unlikely surroundings of Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, in 1660 – the subject of a talk I give to local history societies – and whether or not Joanna Bridges, who lived at Mandinam, Carmarthenshire, in the 1640s and 1650s and married the famous Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor, was really the illegitimate daughter of King Charles I and the Duchess of Lennox. So yes, when it comes to being intrigued and distracted by a historical fact that comes from a fair way across left field, I’m your man.

On Easter Saturday, I had another McEnroe moment. We were exploring Ely Cathedral – one of my favourites – when I came across a plaque next to a floor brass. I hadn’t seen this on previous visits, so presumably it’s fairly new. The plaque proclaimed that the subject commemorated in the brass, Humphrey Tyndall, an Elizabethan Dean of Ely, had been – wait for it - heir to the throne of Bohemia. Now, the idea of a middle-ranking Anglican cleric being next in line to a central European kingdom has pleasing echoes of The Prisoner of Zenda (one of my favourite books) and of the (probably apocryphal) offer of the throne of Albania to the cricketer C B Fry, but it seemed a distinctly implausible one. For one thing, I’d taught the Thirty Years War for long enough to know that by 1619, at least, the throne of Bohemia was elective, that the King thereof was in turn one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, and that the Habsburgs, the Emperors from 1440, always ensured that they occupied the Bohemian throne themselves to ensure their next heir was elected to the imperial crown. (By coincidence, the last Habsburg heir to the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Archduke Otto, last Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, died only last year, becoming the last Habsburg to have a state funeral in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, followed by interment in the Capuchin Crypt, one of the spookiest places I’ve ever visited.) When I started doing serious historical research in the early 1980s, exploring a mystery one stumbled across on an Easter weekend would have had to wait until the opening of the library the following Tuesday, but nowadays, of course, I have but to emulate my lazier ex-students and make straight for Google and Wikipedia!

A Wikipedia entry on the Tyndall family states:

When King Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, she brought with her first cousin, Margaret of Treschen, daughter of Litvaticus, Duke of Tescen in modern Silesia by his wife Elizabeth, sister of Charles IV and daughter of John the Blind, King of Bohemia. This lady married Sir Roger de Felstead (or Bigod), of Felstead in Essex, a standard bearer at the coronation of Richard II and their daughter, Margaret, married Sir Thomas de Tyndall of Talsover and Deane…when the House of Luxemburg died out with the death of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1368–1437)…Sir William Tyndall became one of the heirs to the elective throne of Bohemia. John Nichols (an 18th century antiquary) relates that a delegation of Bohemian boyars were sent to England to offer him the throne but that he refused, the Habsburgs succeeding to a throne they held (with one interruption) until 1918. There was an oral tradition at the University of Cambridge that Humphrey Tyndall, brother of Sir John Tyndall of Mapplestead and uncle (or great uncle) of the eminent deist Dr Matthew Tindal, was again offered the throne by the Protestant party in Bohemia in 1620. This Humphrey was Dean of Ely and President of Queens’ College, Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. Humphrey refused, saying that “he had rather be Queen Elizabeth’s subject than a foreign Prince”, leading to the ill-fated Frederick V, Elector Palatine (married to Elizabeth, daughter of James I and ancestor of the present Queen) becoming King for a year – a development that was a principal cause of the thirty years war.

This account set various alarm bells ringing. ‘Oral tradition at the University of Cambridge’ sounded distinctly dubious – even leaving aside my Oxford bias and any bitterness about the Boat Race – while Tyndall was hardly going to turn down a throne in 1620 (actually 1619) on the grounds that he wanted to remain Queen Elizabeth’s subject when she’d been dead for seventeen years…and Tyndall himself had been dead for five. Another online source says that the offer was made in 1591, which is equally implausible as it was half way through the reign of the King-Emperor Rudolf II – and the idea of the Bohemian Protestants preferring an obscure Fenland cleric like Tyndall to a well-connected prince like Frederick V simply beggars belief. A little more Googling and Wiki-ing casts further doubt on the story. It took me a while to track down ‘Litvaticus, Duke of Teschen’, but this must be Przemyslaus I Noszak, Duke of Cieszyn, duke from 1358 to 1410. He was an important figure at the Imperial court and brokered the marriage between Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia. So far so good for the Tyndall story. But the duke’s wife (sorry, I’m not typing that name again…) was not the sister of the Emperor Charles IV and daughter to John the Blind, King of Bohemia; although she was named Elizabeth, she was the daughter of  Bolesław, Duke of Koźle-Bytom. Charles did have a sister Elizabeth, but she died when only a few months old.

So it seems as though Humphrey Tyndall wasn’t descended from Bohemian royalty; but this begs the question of why so many people, perhaps including himself, believed that he was. It might have been a simple confusion of one fourteenth-century Elizabeth with another, part of a mangled family legend that had been passed down for two hundred years and then mangled again by a couple of eighteenth century antiquarians. But the much-derided antiquarians of the Georgian and Victorian ages sometimes had access to sources that are now lost, and I’ve learned many times not to dismiss their statements out of hand simply because I can’t find anything else to corroborate them. Will the story of Dean Tyndall and the throne of Bohemia be worth a more thorough investigation? Possibly; but probably not. For one thing, I don’t think I can cope with the spellings!

Posted in Historical research, Historical sources, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

1665: The Second Blast

02/04/2012 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

Posted in Naval historical fiction, Naval history | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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